When Bank of America produced a list of businesses “most likely to benefit from generative AI”, RELX was the only UK company to appear in the top 10.

RELX has been using extractive AI for well over a decade. At the forefront of its use of AI technologies is its fastest-growing business, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. In general, the business provides customers – from banks and insurers to airlines and governments – with information-based analytics to help them assess risks posed by a range of critical and increasingly complex issues including fraud, cybercrime and corruption. To do this, it uses machine learning and AI to interpret proprietary data sets, public records and other data.

A major part of the business' work is concerned with helping financial institutions manage risk and compliance, including identity verification, identity theft and financial crime. In particular, tools such as LexisNexis ThreatMetrix enable clients to build strong digital trust with their customers and identify fraud threats early, in near real-time. It can confidently predict when a scam is underway all without interrupting trusted customer interactions.

Steve Elliot, managing director of Business Services in the UK and Ireland, explains that in an increasingly interconnected world, RELX’s analytics and capabilities in AI are invaluable. “Online service providers need to get very good at authenticating who people are and assessing risk – such as the likelihood that someone will commit fraud or default on credit – and that has to be done quickly and credibly.” For Elliot the most exciting part is: “We are getting to a point where we are making it very difficult for fraudsters to commit fraud. With large data sets and AI we can make it very difficult for them to fool the system.”

RELX’s rich data assets are also a powerful tool for improving financial inclusion, potentially helping to lower the number of people who are unable to access affordable financial services in the UK. A study by LexisNexis Risk Solutions suggested that almost 80 per cent of the 7.1m financially excluded UK adults could be effectively risk-rated using alternative data to enhance standard credit scoring methods – from vehicle listings and utility bills to education levels and job stability. This ability to better measure risk makes lower-cost credit more accessible for all consumers while also lowering costs and risk for financial services companies.

Elsevier is one of RELX’s best-known businesses, thanks to flagship publications such as The Lancet and Cell. It publishes more than 3,000 journals and 720,000 academic articles a year. In total, 243 of the 244 science and economics Nobel Prize winners since 2000 have published with Elsevier.

The Lancet, headquartered in London, is the world’s most widely-cited medical journal and in 2023 celebrated its 200th anniversary. Other influential journals such as those published by Cell Press – whose advisory board members and authors have won Nobel Prizes for the past three years – fortify Elsevier’s reputation as one of world’s largest publishers in the field, as well as offering valuable insights to the scientific research community.

“We are trying to help the scholarly community in the UK, which is seen as one of Britain’s best exports,” says Laura Hassink, managing director of Elsevier's journals. RELX and Elsevier are "championing the UK government’s agenda for the country to become a STEM superpower”. Publication plays an important role in advancing researchers’ careers, given the prestige they will gain from having their work in an Elsevier journal.

As part of its support for research, Elsevier offers choice as to how the costs of publication are covered: under a pay to publish (open access) or a pay to read model (subscription model). Increasingly, authors choose open access which makes research available to readers immediately at the point of publication. Elsevier now has over 900 full open access journals. In 2024, it published over 250,000 open access articles, an increase of 30 percent. Hassink says regardless of the model, the aim is to “remove all the barriers, with as few hurdles as possible”, pointing out that Elsevier publishes about 17 percent of the world’s scientific, technical and medical articles every year in both models.

Data analytics are a key part of Elsevier’s offering. “We invest in data and content, using tech as an enabler to support the decisions of our professional customers,” says Maxim Khan, senior vice-president of Elsevier's academic and government solutions.

He points to tools such as SciVal, which is web-based and used by 19 of the 24 Russell Group universities to provide insights into the research performance of 25,000 institutions.

These capabilities are being enhanced with generative AI. The technology is well suited to support researchers and clinicians access reliable medical information and accurate insights, particularly in managing the overwhelming volume of information they need to grapple with.

ScienceDirect AI is the generative AI tool on ScienceDirect, the world's largest platform for peer-reviewed research. The platform extracts, summarises and compares trusted insights from the 22m pieces of content featured. It is a small language model, based on Elsevier's trusted content, designed to minimise the hallucinations that plague large language models, and provides citations for the information provided. Tested by more than 30,000 researchers and librarians from 70 universities, feedback suggests ScienceDirect AI can save 50 percent of the time spent on literature research. 

Then there is ScopusAI, a next-generation tool that combines Elsevier's Scopus, an expertly curated abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research from over 30,000 journals, with responsible AI to help researchers track and discover global knowledge in all fields. The platform is used by over 5,000 universities worldwide and around 500 corporate accounts globally.

A central focus today for Elsevier is safeguarding the integrity of research. As the volume of published articles grows, so does the risk of fraudulent research. While this account for only a small percentage of research overall, it represents a challenge for the whole scientific community. Elsevier is investing tens of millions of dollars in sophisticated technology that can detect integrity issues barely visible to the human eye and combining that with in-house expertise. These models can process as many as 7,500 manuscripts per hour for fraud concerns.

Another key push by Elsevier to further advance inclusive learning saw the launch of the world’s first 3D female anatomy model, as well as the first diversity models, in a major step forward for the medical profession. Since ancient Greece, students have almost exclusively learned about white male bodies; the female anatomy model will help educate the next generation better and address gender inequalities in healthcare.

RELX’s fourth business, Exhibitions (RX), puts on the biggest trade shows in the UK, including World Travel Market (WTM), which boasts the participation of 184 countries and more than 46,000 travel professionals, in an area the size of five football pitches at ExCel London. RX’s free to attend Big Data LDN show is the UK’s leading data, analytics and AI event, while the London Book Fair draws more than 32,000 publishing professionals from around the globe each year. In 2024, over 6m people participated in 282 events across 25 countries.

All these events help UK companies showcase their expertise and products. Kerry Prince, RX’s UK managing director, describes the business as “the physical manifestation of a digital platform”. She continues: “In essence, we bring buyers and sellers together, providing information back and forth on both sides… It’s the place to be to meet like-minded people and talk about the issues, challenges and opportunities, to take the whole industry forward.”

Importantly, most of the participants are small and medium-sized enterprises, many of which have built their business on the back of trade shows, according to Prince. As one customer testimonial puts it: “World Travel Market works the best for us. We track all leads, and of the 41 trade shows we do globally, World Travel Market converts the most and provides the highest return on investment with face-to-face meetings. Nothing compares to a physical trade show.” Another agreed: “It’s essential for networking, all the players are there.”

One current focus is shows that are supporting businesses in their transition to net zero, such as All-Energy and Dcarbonise. Hosted in Glasgow, All-Energy is the UK’s largest low-carbon energy event, bringing together the renewable-energy community for two days, while Dcarbonise is aimed at energy consumers in the private and public sectors.

After a tough period during the pandemic, RX bounced back strongly driven by significant face to face activity combined with digital tools and platforms that are a key lever for customers' businesses and the national economy to expand.

Trade shows, legal information, financial risk, scientific advancement: across all its businesses, RELX in the UK is pushing innovation and growth, making responsible use of cutting-edge technologies and ensuring its products are available to benefit those most in need. Prince sums up: “It’s a company with its foot in today, and its eye on the future. We are hugely aware of the importance of data and our ability to harness it in the future.”