When Graeme Morrison and Duncan Ewen joined The Ardonagh Group in the 2nd quarter of 2018, one of their key objectives was to oversee the installation of a sanctions screening tool across the group’s portfolio of insurance businesses.

Formed in mid-2017, the independent insurance broker has a network of over 100 offices and a workforce of over 6,000 people, so achieving consistency and centralising data was an important but mammoth task, says Graeme, Ardonagh’s Head of Financial Crime.

“The group had grown very quickly through the acquisition of a number of separate organisations,” Graeme explains. “Each of those had its own processes in place, so its sanction screening framework was very fragmented and such disparate systems were no longer appropriate for the size of the organisation.”

In order to achieve consistency across the group, Ardonagh deployed LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ Bridger Insight® XG. “We did a limited look around to see what other options were available, but we knew it was a good quality product,” Graeme states. “Plus, the relationship with LexisNexis Risk Solutions already existed elsewhere in the group, and we didn’t want to go back to square one when we needed to address the sanctions risk in a holistic manner,” he adds.

Speed of implementation was essential for the company and LexisNexis Risk Solutions didn’t fail to deliver. Ardonagh’s clear agenda, coupled with high-level support from the LexisNexis Risk Solutions implementation team, meant the solution was up and running within a week.

“We spent two days working out what we needed and tailoring the solution, and within a week we had a tool that was ready to accept data! I cannot think of any other implementation that I have been involved with, that had such speed of delivery,” says Duncan, Deputy Head of Financial Crime.

Within three months after installation, a third of the records across the Ardonagh Group were being screened, with the rest of the book completed by April this year. Efficiencies were achieved through the creation of a centralised department dedicated solely to the output of alerts.

“The delay to the rest of the book had nothing to do with LexisNexis Risk Solutions,” adds Duncan. “It was to do with our need to standardise our data and push it through the system” Overcoming these barriers and persisting with making the input data conform to a standard format, has helped the firm achieve a uniform screening approach within the Group. “We now have a robust tool in place that we can quite confidently say captures all of the appropriate data and screens it daily, to an agreed standard,” Duncan says.

Delivering the solution ahead of schedule and below budget has also been a big win for the group. Duncan concludes: “Using Bridger Insight XG has saved the business time, money and effort. I am pretty confident that the ongoing run costs associated with using the application are less than how we were doing it before. We needed that consistency and LexisNexis Risk Solutions gave us that.”