how relx integrates its acquisitions

It starts well before the deal closes and continues for months afterwards. RELX’s careful approach to integrating the companies it buys is a major success factor in delivering sustained growth.

Small, targeted acquisitions have long been a key element of RELX’s growth strategy: it typically buys around 10 businesses a year, spending £400m a year on average in the process. It then devotes huge effort to integrating these companies into its four divisions: LexisNexis Risk Solutions, its risk business; Elsevier, its medical and science arm; LexisNexis Legal & Professional, its legal business; and RX, the exhibition business.

In financial terms, RELX’s acquisitions are modest relative to the company’s size so the impact on the group if one does not work out as planned is minimal. But in the deals that RELX does, the risks are unusually asymmetric – the upside, when they go right, will be orders of magnitude bigger. For example, LexisNexis Legal & Professional attributes the improved answer quality and accelerated personalised AI features of its flagship AI legal assistant commercialised in August 2025 to the acquisition of Henchman, a Belgian legal technology company it acquired 13 months prior.

“The absolute priority for RELX is organic growth,” says Sybella Stanley, RELX’s director of corporate finance, who oversees the group’s acquisition pipeline. “That means acquisitions are always led by the strategic priorities of each division to deliver that organic growth – perhaps they need to supplement their products, or they can see an opportunity to accelerate their progress. Those are the reasons that we buy businesses.”

Once RELX is confident it has found the right product or technology solution to accelerate its growth plans and create value for customers, the basic conditions for a successful acquisition are in place. But for any deal to unfold as people hope, there must be a shared vision with the company’s founders of what they can achieve by combining with RELX. This is critical and focuses on the human aspects of the proposition, rather than the technology and the numbers – on the personalities who will make it happen, their ambitions and concerns.

The goal is to converge on a shared vision of the opportunity, so that the founders can see the advantages of becoming part of RELX, rather than taking venture capital or private equity investment and remaining independent. They need to be convinced that they will achieve their ambitions for the company they have built faster and on a much bigger scale by agreeing to be acquired. To feel confident about that, they must see that RELX views their business in the same way they do and that their ambitions are aligned – after all, they will also have to accept that their company will inevitably change once the deal is signed and it becomes a small part of a much bigger organisation. 

“There are always pros and cons,” says Louis Opsomer, chief financial officer of Henchman, which became part of LexisNexis Legal & Professional last year. “But LexisNexis was the only party in our opinion that could actually execute our vision of becoming the center of knowledge for law firms. You know you’re going to lose your brand, but the fact that we could execute our vision on a much bigger scale outweighed that.”

High-quality companies always have choices. The founders of 3D4Medical, Henchman and IDVerse all considered other potential routes before deciding to go with RELX, and in some cases the discussions intensified when RELX learned they were looking seriously at other avenues. The factors that swayed their decision were based not only on a shared vision of what they could achieve with RELX, but also on what they learned about their acquirer and its culture during the due diligence process.

Both Opsomer at Henchman and Matthew Adams and Dan Aiello, co-founders of IDVerse, were impressed by how long the people they were dealing with had worked at RELX. “The tenure that you see with people in leadership positions and in general at LexisNexis is massive,” says Opsomer. “Even though it’s a huge company, everyone knows each other and knows where to get the right answer.” Johnston at Elsevier's 3D4Medical says the six years since the acquisition in 2019 “has provided a significant opportunity for talented people to get to another level professionally that we, as a small company, could not have offered them.”

From RELX’s perspective, Stanley stresses the importance of being transparent with founders during the deal discussions and “doing what you say you’re going to do”. Adams and Aiello at IDVerse say they were reassured on this score by the experience of ThreatMetrix, another Australian company that LexisNexis Risk Solutions had already bought. “Seeing how they kept the team intact and how they grew was a really good reference for us to see how they would treat us,” recalls Aiello.

Adams, meanwhile, says his impressions of RELX were borne out by the experience of meeting scores of senior colleagues in Barcelona at their first management gathering. “You realise that all these organisations that have been brought in share the same vision that you had as a founder and what you wanted to do for your business and your customers. There were so many of them around us. I genuinely did not expect that in such a large organisation."

Read more about RELX's acquisition strategy in this story.