Making French connections in a digital age

In 2022, as the world stumbled from one global crisis into another with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, RELX faced a challenge. Staff in the Paris offices of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, part of RELX, worked tirelessly, transferring names from watch lists published by governments around the world to the company’s sanctions enforcement data software. It’s a complex task: for sanctions to work, the company must include the names of thousands of individuals and related family members; businesses, subsidiaries and ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs); products, dual-use goods and associated prohibitions; and geographical restrictions on certain goods.

“The effectiveness of sanctions depends on the effectiveness of RELX systems,” says Franck Lanher, chairman, France of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

Franck Lanher, Chairman, France, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Franck Lanher, Chairman, France, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Compliance departments in banks, financial institutions and corporates worldwide rely upon sanctions-enforcing software to flag up potential contraventions before they are processed. Blocking banned financial flows is tough because both speed and accuracy are critical, Franck Lanher says. “When a sanction is decided, it has to be implemented right away. We have to test all the names added. We want the software to automatically detect these people and reduce false positives.”

“This is a field where you need expertise and we have great expertise here in France,” says Franck Lanher matter-of-factly.

There are around 1,400 employees of RELX in France, where the group can trace its roots back to 1804 and the aftermath of the French Revolution. LexisNexis Risk Solutions is the fastest-growing business in RELX’s hefty portfolio, but during the pandemic RELX’s French businesses also helped companies to stay connected, students to learn and scientists and doctors to study and share information about the new virus. In Europe, as elsewhere, the company put its data and its mastery of data analysis in the service of public good.

Parsing terabytes to ensure financial compliance and fraud detection

So much of the group’s success is down to increasingly sophisticated analytics and decision-making tools that help customers to work more effectively. The growth of LexisNexis Risk Solutions derives from continuous product innovation and from multiple targeted acquisitions, including the 2014 acquisition of Fircosoft, a French startup whose advanced real-time payment-screening had been adopted by top-tier banks around the world. But the group’s expertise in risk and financial data goes way back to the 19th century, when “The Banking Almanac and Directory” was created in 1845 to help financial institutions find and confirm contact information for banking institutions to facilitate the transfer of capital.

The backbone of this business was enabling fast and safe financial transactions. But as globalisation and digitalisation turned the trickle of international finance into a flood, policymakers and regulators began demanding that financial institutions and corporates increase their capabilities to choke off illicit financial flows. Since 1994, Fircosoft systems have been able to parse transaction data and flag dubious deals to compliance officers. Today, that puts the company’s 160 Paris employees at the forefront of the battle to stamp out unlawful or risky financial flows and business counter-parties.

Franck Lanher, a graduate of Paris business school HEC, is an adept of the business and data interface. He spent a decade at Finland’s Nokia before joining Fircosoft, where he was managing director for Europe and the Middle East at the time of the RELX acquisition. “We work with over 90% of the Fortune 100; 80% of the Fortune 500; seven of the world’s top ten banks and 98 of the top 100 personal lines insurance companies,” he says.

Today, RELX's LexisNexis Risk Solutions delivers actionable insights for various business purposes in France, of which the main ones are financial crime compliance and fraud detection.

The group provides solutions for all businesses to operate in compliance with international economic sanctions programmes. “We are the global leader and largest investor in that field today,” says Franck Lanher.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions also helps banks, financial institutions and designated businesses and professionals meet their obligations under anti-money laundering / combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regulations now in force across much of the globe. Again, this requires data and analytics to assess the risk of financial counter-parties and to detect suspicious transactions. Such flows are estimated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to amount to between 2 percent and 5 percent of global GDP, of which Franck Lanher says we can detect or stop just a too small proportion today. “We are far from where we want to be but digitalisation is going to help massively. Our expertise is in data, data analytics and workflow management."

Its third essential contribution to the French economy lies in its fraud detection capabilities by enabling clients to verify identities and detect fraud. “Our solutions ensure that the person who is making an online transaction is really the person she or he pretends to be and not a fraudster. We deliver near real-time risk analysis that allows companies to determine what action they will take on a customer's transaction, whether it is an account creation, a payment or a subscription to a service.”

“For us it was a natural extension of our financial crime compliance capabilities to also contribute to the fight against fraud, as you also need to be able to scan vasts amounts of data and perform checks with minimum disruption for legitimate customers,” says Franck Lanher.

Putting knowledge at the service of science and the people

The history and role of RELX in France is entwined with the respect for knowledge in a nation that contributed generously to the birth of modern scientific thought. The Masson publishing house, founded in Paris in 1804 a few short years after the revolution, established itself as the premier French-language publisher of medical and scientific material. Bolstered by organic growth and acquisitions, it became part of the Havas publishing stable in 1994. Among its challengers at that time was Elsevier Science, a Netherlands-based forerunner to RELX, which set up a Paris operation in 1984. In 2005 Reed Elsevier acquired Masson and merged the two businesses to form Elsevier Masson.

The business today is part of Elsevier, one of the world's fastest growing open access publishers, which in 2021 received over 2.5m article submissions and published over 600,000 articles around the world. European operations generated 23 percent of Elsevier’s €3.1bn 2021 revenues.

In France, Elsevier Masson's legacy holds a unique position within a unique market, says William Rubens, Elsevier’s regional account director, and not just because it is the last remaining French-language medical science publisher.

William Rubens, Regional Account Director, Elsevier

Elsevier Masson publishes more than 100 journals, including those of 70 medical societies – of cardiologists, radiologists and so on. Based at Issy-les-Moulineaux, in south-west Paris, its 240 staff support Elsevier's status as the preferred partner of French scientists. Close to 30% of French papers are published in Elsevier's international and French portfolio. Elsevier is playing a key role in the development and sharing of scientific ideas globally but also among the world’s 54 French-speaking nations, home to an eighth of humanity.

The digitalisation of content, backed by Elsevier’s powerful analytics tools, is helping transform the capacity and capability of French science. For nearly ten year, Elsevier has had an all-embracing contract with the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation: the company gives access to over 2,000 top scientific journals on ScienceDirect, Elsevier's platform of peer-reviewed literature, to more than 100,000 researchers across the country. This national license allows all French public organisations that belong to the Ministry of High Education and Research to access the platform and guarantees equality of access. In France, equal access to education is a guiding tenet of the country’s Republican principles.

William Rubens came to scientific publishing via business schools. “Scientists and researchers are so knowledgeable,” he says. “A third of their time is dedicated to learning. This makes me, us, very humble.”

He revels in putting Elsevier’s fast-developing command of data science and analysis at the service of medical researchers and academics. One example is a collaboration with the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble-Alpes. Teams from the Centre and Elsevier have collaborated to apply machine learning to patient data – from X-rays to medical notes – creating a model that flags patients susceptible to complications during hospitalisation or surgery. By enabling doctors to give special care, this has the potential to reduce illness, shorten hospital stays and free up medical resources.

The worldwide surge in conspiracy theories, fake news and disinformation has given Elsevier’s work a moral dimension, William Rubens says. It’s a topic close to his heart. “We ensure that scientists get access, not just to the truth, but to the right information,” he says. “Research integrity is becoming more and more critical in the fight against fake science and fake news.”

As part of this, Elsevier is supporting some research projects, one of them led by cognitive scientists LaPsyDe to help them study how best to combat misinformation. “They discovered that the way you teach kids will influence their capacity to have an opinion – to think critically,” William Rubens says. “I am pretty sure this is a fight we will win, but it will take ages. Everybody has a role to play.” Elsevier is also a 'Grand Donateur' of Imagine, the research institute that fights against rare diseases affecting children around the globe. "This make us feel extremely proud of supporting top researchers in France," says William Rubens.

William Rubens, Regional Account Director, Elsevier

Levelling access to medical and nursing learning

The desire to do good for society seems to run through RELX executives like a fil rouge, a golden thread. “I’m still passionate after 25 years,” admits Claude Schnitter, content director of ClinicalKey Student, an interactive education platform that supports students and faculty by enhancing their learning experience.

He points to the way that ClinicalKey Student learning programmes developed by Elsevier help overcome imbalances in access to medical schools, where the students are dominated by the middle class. The lack of égalité goes against Claude Schnitter’s Republican values: “If you look at the socio-economic profile of medical students, most are the children of professionals, there is a real lack of diversity.”

Claude Schnitter, Content Director, ClinicalKey Student, Elsevier France

Skills shortages are also a big issue. “In France, as elsewhere, there is a huge shortage of medical professionals and in nursing the situation is even worse,” he explains.

So, in collaboration with Elsevier colleagues around the globe, Claude Schnitter and his team have made it their mission to improve the quality and accessibility of training materials and programmes for medical and nursing studies.

It’s a task for which he is well qualified. After a degree in molecular biology, and a PhD in the history of science, he moved into medical publishing, becoming part of Elsevier in 2005 when it acquired Masson.

ClinicalKey Student, launched in France in 2018, is an interactive education platform targeting up to 60,000 medical students all along their medical curriculum. The nursing content, which gained approvals a year later, is targeting the 100,000 students and their instructors, in some 330 nursing schools.

ClinicalKey Student makes available all the study books and materials published by Elsevier in four languages: English, French, German and Spanish. The French version contains known translations, like Gray’s and Netter brand references in anatomy, but more than nine-tenths of the French language content is local, generated by recognised local authors. The vast searchable database includes thousands of images and videos.

The advantages of an interactive platform with interconnected content over textbooks are manifold. All the materials are in one place and interconnected. A student studying diabetes, say, can flip between textbook chapters, images, videos, assessment questions, with the click of a mouse and learn in the way that suits them best.

The solution also offers self-assessment tools, so students can identify and remedy their weak spot. And they can share notes and materials with others in a study group. “To buy all those books would cost a fortune,” says Claude Schnitter. “So wealthy students had a big advantage. Now all students have the same access to content.”

Claude Schnitter is excited about the potential of digital to further transform learning into opportunities. “Data and analytics are transforming the learning-teaching journey of medical and nursing students and instructors; they will all benefit from those transformations.”

Claude Schnitter, Content Director, ClinicalKey Student, Elsevier France

Deploying data analytics to aid a nation of small law firms

Nowhere within RELX is the power of data – and smart data processing – more evident than in LexisNexis Legal & Professional, the company’s legal information business. Eric Bonnet-Maes, the Chief Executive of LexisNexis Continental Europe Middle East and Africa, is convinced that by supplying legal professionals with the means to make better decisions, he and his team are helping to make the world a better place.

Eric Bonnet-Maes, Chief Executive Officer, LexisNexis Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa

“We are fortunate within LexisNexis to have a mission to strengthen and develop the rule of the law in the countries where we are present,” he says. “France has a legal system that has been developing over many, many years, but no legal system is perfect.”

Services to lawyers generated €1.8bn of RELX’s revenues in 2021 and 22 percent of those were earned in Europe. Of 1,300 employees in Europe overseen by Bonnet-Maes, over 500 work in France, including 150 in editorial and around 100 in information technology roles. That’s a world Eric Bonnet-Maes understands well. He joined LexisNexis in 2007, with stints as chief operating officer of LexisNexis France and Chief Executive of LexisNexis Asia.

The core of the French legal business today is Lexis 360® Intelligence. This online legal database accounts for 60 percent of francophone sales. It contains 23m documents, sorted into a taxonomy of 170,000 legal concepts in 17 layers. The French legal system is based on the 'Code Civil' issued by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 (since imitated in many other countries). Case law also increasingly influences legal arguments and decisions. So Lexis 360® Intelligence absorbs court judgments from the national database, then provides tools that allow semantic searches and enriches this data with analysis from a panel of 800 leading lawyers whom it commissions to provide guidance on particular issues.

The value of this digital service in France cannot be overstated. The French legal profession has not seen the concentration of the US and UK and, according to Bonnet-Maes, less than 200 firms have more than 20 fee earners and a little over 50 firms employ more than 50 fee earners. Many lawyers still work alone, or in tiny 'cabinets', so rely heavily upon research to acquire the expertise they need to handle complex cases.

RELX bought the business in 1993. It digitalised the French offer more than two decades ago and the Paris operation collaborates with RELX peers around the world to develop new software and functions. The smart database is complemented by workflow management tools that both offer guidance in drafting documents and help lawyers to manage their practices.

Lawyers become more proficient and more productive as a result, cutting the cost of litigation and improving its quality.

Eric Bonnet-Maes, Chief Executive Officer, LexisNexis Continental Europe, Middle East and Africa

Offline and on, the shows must go on

There was an air of exhilaration when the world’s leading real-estate movers and shakers gathered in Cannes in March this year, just as France lifted most of its remaining pandemic controls.

After two years of Covid-19 turmoil, which first disrupted and then durably modified the ways we meet and work, the massive MIPIM real-estate event was a heady whirl of long-overdue reunions, speeches, seminars and networking.

“This is an industry like no other,” says Morgane Morice, chief marketing officer of RELX exhibitions business RX France. “We bring magic and adrenaline to business and people’s lives. We help people to grow their business.”

Morice is originally from Burgundy, but spent her high-school years in the US, went to management school in Bordeaux, worked in marketing and communications in Dublin and joined RX in London. That international portfolio of experience gives her a good perspective on change in France, where traditional, hierarchical, management is modernising. Younger French people are mission-oriented, she says, and they insist upon a better work/life balance.

Morgane Morice, Chief Marketing Officer, RX France

After two rollercoaster years, the excitement of an exhibitions business back on the road is clear to see. Covid hit RX hard, but in 2021 RELX’s global exhibitions business saw revenues surge by 48 percent. And 35 percent of that is generated in Europe.

In 2020 RX France ran just two shows out of a 30-strong portfolio, both before the lockdowns hit. But sequestered at home, staff threw their energies into a project called New Value Generation, setting up a slew of digital B2B platforms, organising weekly webinars for buyers and sellers, and – with striking success – building a sector-focused web radio and podcast media business that provided original content. The company changed its data strategy with an inbound and content first approach. The value and impact were quickly demonstrated in 2020 when it acquired 20,000 leads at at a time when no shows were taking place, and 80% of these leads were new customers.

“What we are selling is the relationship,” Morice explains. “We have to know who are the buyers and sellers, and bring them together.”

As normal life resumes, the New Value Generation project remains in place, complementing exhibitions with four digital platforms servicing construction, franchise, entertainment and hospitality. New digital features for the art fairs such as Chance Encounter seek to replicate the serendipity of wandering the aisles of a fair. An online radio station, Batiradio, highlights new products to buyers in the construction sector. Instead of waiting for an annual show to build its industry data, RX now starts gathering information before the show via online media. Keeping close contact with buyers and sellers online has helped the physical exhibition business bounce back, as online users rush to renew the face-to-face experience.

Since combining its Reed Exhibitions and Reed MIPIM businesses in June 2021, the company is building back and Morice is hiring in a tightening labour market. She needs digital skills, because the digital offer now complements the spectacular in-person events, and she’s also looking for content managers and sector experts, as well as growth managers and data analysts.

They’ll be joining a company headquartered in Puteaux, near La Défense, with a culture that has emerged from upheaval both more dynamic and organic, Morice says. “It is all about giving people missions, objectives and purpose.”

Contributing to tomorrow’s understanding

Respect for the changing demands and expectations of employees and nurturing them and their environment, fits the common thread of responsible and purposeful activity that characterises RELX and its people in France. It’s a spread of digital businesses which create value by assembling vast databases of knowledge and allowing customers to gain insights.

Today, 86 percent of group activity is electronic. As knowledge accrues, and analytics tools become more sophisticated, RELX’s contribution to understanding and insights can only grow. The skills it seeks today have evolved, too. More than ever, RELX needs editors and technologists to help us make sense of the world. To echo Eric Bonnet-Maes, it’s a business for people with good hearts, as well as fine minds.

Morgane Morice, Chief Marketing Officer, RX France