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.

At the forefront of RELX’s engagement with artificial intelligence 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 theft and financial crime. In particular, tools such as LexisNexisThreatMetrix enable clients to build strong digital trust with their customers and identify fraud threats early.

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 recent study by LexisNexis Risk Solutions suggested that almost 80 per cent of the 7.1m people currently without a credit rating 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 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 2,800 journals and 600,000 academic articles a year. In total, 224 of the 225 science and economics Nobel Prize winners since 2000 have published with Elsevier.

The Lancet, headquartered in London, is the world’s most widely-cited public health 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 RELX’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 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 (subsciption model). Increasingly, authors choose open access which makes research available to readers immediately at the point of publication. 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 18 percent of the world’s scientific, technical and medical articles every year in both models.

Another key push by Elsevier to counter inequality saw the launch of the world’s first female anatomy model last year, 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.

Data analytics add to 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 analytics products and data platforms.

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 over 22,000 institutions. Then there is Scopus, an expertly curated abstract and citation database with content from over 27,000 journals to help researchers track and explore global knowledge. It is used by about 5,000 universities worldwide and some 1,000 corporations, including GSK, 3i Group, IBM and Boeing.

A central focus today for Elsevier is confidence in research, given the increasing spread online of misinformation and the use of AI generated content. “AI offers both threats and opportunities,” says Hassink. “In publishing, AI enables us to build tools that help editors and reviewers to further improve the peer review process and with that the quality of published articles. We need to be mindful that AI is not used in the wrong way though, so the use of AI needs to be done responsibly and with common sense,” she adds, warning of bad actors that can weaponise the technology and spread scientific misinformation.

Generative AI is of growing importance to the legal industry. LexisNexis Legal & Professional, RELX’s legal business, recently announced the launch of Lexis+ AI, a platform designed to improve efficiency and profitability within the legal sector.

Unlike other freely available AI tools, Lexis+ AI is trained on the largest repository of accurate and exclusive legal documents and records.  Coupled with LexisNexis’ longstanding investment of more than $1bn over the past decade in natural language processing, machine learning and extractive AI, Lexis+ AI is “a first-of-its-kind solution”, according to Gerry Duffy, LexisNexis Legal & Professional’s UK managing director. 

The platform’s ability to search and synthesise vast amounts of information goes to the heart of a lawyer’s workflow.  The technology offers conversational search, insightful summarisation and intelligent legal drafting, whilst always linking to verifiable, citable authorities.  As Duffy puts it: “our customers depend on our critical resources: legal information, practical guidance and workflow tools necessary to drive efficiency, mitigate risk and underpin growth.”  Top law firms such as Baker McKenzie, Reed Smith and Foley & Lardner are already testing the platform.

Lexis+ AI is built to the RELX principles of responsible AI. Duffy continues: “we can always explain how our solution works.  We ensure accountability of results with human reinforced learning of the AI model, and we proactively work to prevent the creation or reinforcement of unfair bias.  As you would expect, we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards of data privacy and governance and we actively consider the real-world impact of our solutions.”

LexisNexis is also helping advance the rule of law around the world through its Rule of Law Foundation. It helps institutions from the legal, judicial, academic and NGO sectors support projects that defend principles such as equal treatment under the law, transparency of the law, access to legal remedy and independent judiciaries.

One way it is doing this is through its work with the International Bar Association to bring war criminals to justice with the help of the eyeWitness to Atrocities app, which enables the authentication of images of war crimes. More than 60,000 photos and videos have been received so far and 53+ dossiers submitted to different investigative bodies around the world.  

In the seven months following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, eyeWitness to Atrocities app users uploaded almost 20,000 photos, videos, and audio recordings relating to the deteriorating human rights situation in Ukraine.  Evidence of human rights violations is submitted to the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine for further investigation. 

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 nearly 200 countries and more than 35,000 travel professionals, in an area the size of five football pitches at ExCel London. RX’s free to attend Big Data London show is the UK’s leading data, analytics and AI conference, while the London Book Fair draws more than 25,000 publishing professionals from around the globe each year. In 2022, over 4.1m people participated in 254 events across 22 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 in 2022, with revenues growing by 64 per cent.

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.”