Tag: Insurance Underwriting

Artesian: DueDil Rebrands as FullCircl

The new FullCircl homepage

Artesian: Duedil rebranded as FullCircl and staked out the Customer Lifecycle Intelligence (CLI) space as its TLA (three-letter acronym).  The UK-based firm was created last September when Artesian and Duedil merged and temporarily adopted the cumbersome Artesian: DueDil name.

“The rebrand, which unifies and consolidates the previous two company’s solutions, is more than just a name change,” explained FullCircl.  “It’s a stake in the ground, as FullCircl seeks to enter a new and distinct market category.”

“In a nutshell, we help our customers find, engage with, and quickly onboard the right customers, and then keep them for life,” explained CEO Andrew Yates.  “Customer Lifecycle Intelligence is vital in every step of that process which if done well creates a virtuous circle.  We couldn’t think of a better name given the fact we help with every stage of the customer journey – we go full-circle.”

“Today marks a new chapter in our evolution as we unveil our bold vision for the future.  The cost to acquire and serve continues to rise.  Regulated businesses need to find customers that fit their business and risk profile faster, onboard them quicker while satisfying legal and regulatory requirements, and keep them for life to grow and scale efficiently.  FullCircl is on a mission to help them do just that.  With FullCircl businesses can move really fast, whether it’s automated data collection and critical checks, ensuring compliance, confidently targeting the right customers, or growing advocacy through frictionless onboarding and support.  We give them the speed to succeed.”

FullCircl COO Justin Fitzpatrick

Customer Lifecycle Intelligence (CLI) complements Customer Lifecycle Management and addresses many challenges facing regulated financial services companies.  First, CLI helps them identify the right customers that fit both business requirements and risk appetite.  It then supports rapid onboarding with little friction, as the data gathering process is significantly reduced.  Finally, CLI supports ongoing Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and credit checks both during the onboarding process and proactively across the customer lifecycle.

CLM has a trio of shortcomings that CLI addresses:

  1. CLM requires too much customer input that slows the onboarding process
  2. CLM is reactive
  3. CLM does not provide recommendations around which accounts to target and which ones to avoid.

FullCircl helps its customers “do better business, faster,” with rapid data ingestion, data validation, and data enrichment support.  By expediting the data gathering process and validating the data, friction is removed from onboarding workflows.

Removing friction both reduces costs and onboarding time and increases customer conversion rates.  By combining a broad set of customer intelligence, CLI also reduces compliance and financial risk while improving the customer experience.  Furthermore, because CLI is proactive and rules-based, it flags both risks and opportunities earlier than traditional processes while offering continuous compliance and automated remediation.

“At the point at which you’ve identified and engaged with that customer, you need to be able to offer them a seamless onboarding experience, which ticks the boxes from a compliance and regulatory perspective [and] from a financial risk perspective,” explained COO Justin Fitzpatrick to GZ Consulting.  “This is part of the rationale for why we brought the two businesses together…Keeping the customers for life and taking CLM from a reactive process to a proactive process.”

One of the difficulties facing financial services is risk banding new clients and scheduling periodic customer reviews (e.g., 6, 12, or 18 months).  This process “puts a tremendous strain on the organization, because they’re having to go back through that back book, flag anything that’s changed…[and] falls outside of the risk and compliance policies of the organization,” continued Fitzpatrick.  “The ideal solution is you’ve pre-screened the customer so that you can lead them through that seamless onboarding journey, but then…constantly stay on top of them.  So, when changes occur, those changes are automatically cross-referenced against your policies, and your people are alerted and flagged about what’s changed and what they need to do about it.  That’s the vision around CLI.”

FullCircl combines Artesian’s event monitoring and alerting capabilities with DueDil’s B.I.G. API real-time company and contact intelligence.  The combined dataset includes both structured and unstructured information derived from official data sources and the open web.  Sources include registered company financials; mortgages, charges, and county court judgments; gazette status (e.g., bankruptcies, winddowns); Companies House images; directors and shareholders; politically exposed persons; sanctions lists; web-mined intelligence; and business events.

FullCircl also provides a set of derived data that assesses connections within the data.  Derived data includes 270 million corporate connections for the UK and Ireland, industry keywords, and embedded logic to identify the ultimate beneficial owner.

FullCircl also offers a rules engine with off-the-shelf rules for defining organizational policies.  It is a “low-code decision engine that allows financial institutions to codify policies for credit and risk, or advanced pre-qualification, applying these rules at the point of need.”  In addition, the rules engine supports initial onboarding, periodic reviews, and account alerts.

“The rules engine is effectively a dictionary of more than 500 off-the-shelf rules that can be combined into policies that allow you to construct any kind of combination of…[rules and] the policies of your organization…[It] has two uses in the FullCircl offering going forward.  The first is related to proactive alerts.  You define the policy with a set of criteria about a business, and anytime a business comes into those criteria or falls out of them, you get alerted…The second use case is around screenings or periodic reviews.  You might have a book of 15,000 customers, and you want to periodically go ahead and review the whole thing…[You] run those businesses through that screening functionality, which is basically checking the status of those businesses against the rules that have been defined.”

The launch of FullCircl comes as challenger banks are rapidly digitizing their workflows and looking to contain costs and automate customer onboarding, risk monitoring, and portfolio reviews.

“Good RMs are expensive.  There’s a certain size of customer for which it doesn’t really make sense to have one-to-one personal account management or relationship management.  Digital challenger banks are picking up on this and trying to go to market with a proposition that is digital-first.  They’ve stripped out the cost of the branches and the big footprint, and they’re trying to be smart about how they apply data to make these products and services more personalized,” said Fitzpatrick.  “But even the incumbent banks have to move to a model which leverages technology better.  In some cases, a smaller team of relationship managers is pooling together and monitoring a much bigger book of customers.  Pooling like this becomes incredibly important for them…to stay on top of all of those customers and to know how, and when, to interact with them.”

FullCircl supports over 600 customers, three-quarters of which are in the regulated financial services sector.  Last year, they added 120 new logos in the UK and posted double-digit revenue growth.

FullCircl’s manifesto is to help financial services companies “find customers that fit your risk profile, onboard them quicker, and keep them for life.”

Market Flash: Artesian Solutions and DueDil Merge

This morning, Artesian Solutions and DueDil announced the merger of their two firms.  Both vendors serve the B2B FinTech/RegTech/SalesTech spaces with products that assist their 700 customers in onboarding clients, performing KYC/AML checks, prospecting, and monitoring customers.

The merger took place six weeks ago and was described as a partnership at the time. However, they held off on the formal announcement until “everything was aligned.”

Artesian/DueDil is currently working on a combined brand identity that reflects the offerings of both companies. For this blog, I am, therefore, referring to them as “the merged company.”

Over eighty percent of their revenue comes from the financial services sector (Banking and Insurance), with products covering the UK, Ireland, US, and Canada.  While Artesian and DueDil serve the same market, they have only eight joint customers, providing significant upsell and cross-sell opportunities for their primary offerings:

  • Engage – Artesian’s Sales Intelligence offering supports prospecting, customer research, financials, Companies House images, industry research, and high precision news tagging and alerting.  Other tools include the Ready mobile app (meeting prep and meeting chat) and CRM connectors for Salesforce and MS Dynamics.
  • Connect – Artesian’s compliance and onboarding platform supports company screening, customer due diligence, and a configurable decision engine that ingests third-party data.  As a compliance and decisioning platform, Connect displays early warning indicators, supports KYC and AML checks, and delivers adverse media alerts.

    Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks.  Connect supports Artesian’s Premium Data feeds, the B.I.G., and customer-licensed third-party data integrations.
  • B.I.G. – DueDil’s Business Information Graph spans 270 million relationships, including companies, directors, shareholders, and subsidiaries.  Roughly thirty percent of the relationships are curated.  The graph is updated three or four times a day.
  • DueDil APIs – DueDil’s premium API also provides the capability to access B.I.G. data and plug it into existing systems “quickly and seamlessly” to power automated KYC / KYB and onboarding journeys.
Artesian supports sales intelligence (Engage) and FSI onboarding and compliance (Connect).

The companies have complementary capabilities.  Artesian Solutions offers mobile tools, CRM connectors, business events, a rules engine, and web applications.  Conversely, DueDil has focused on a set of APIs and relationship data.

“Our new company will be able to make strategic investments for sustainable and profitable growth, remaining agile to new opportunities whilst keeping focused on leveraging our newly combined strength to drive greater value for our customers.”

Artesian+DueDil CEO Andrew Yates

“If you can imagine the Big Information Graph, the APIs with their published endpoints that make them really quick and effective to integrate, a rules engine, and then a host of really powerful frontline applications, and middle-office applications, that’s what we mean by end-to-end,” explained Yates to GZ Consulting.  “There’s a market in the FinTech space, which is ‘just give me the data as it is’ as a service prepackaged with rules to do things like digital onboarding, straight-through processing, and automated underwriting. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got people-centric relationship management.  People not only want to get access to the insight and the data, but they need the applications that link all of that together and link that back to the customer.”

“We’ve been very effective at helping our customers find the right customers, and more laterally, using things like screening technology and forensic analysis with the rules engine,” continued Yates.  “DueDil has been focused on the onboarding journey and the remediation journey, so onboard them faster and keep them for life.”

There are two ways that Artesian adds value to commodity data, said the merged company’s COO Justin Fitzpatrick, who formerly led DueDil.  The first is by creating “proprietary, derived data” such as relationship connections.  The second is to embed “business logic around those data points” to answer “business-critical questions.”

“We can provide data that helps them check that they can onboard the customer. But at the end of the day, ideally, our clients want to be able to shortcut that process and know whether they can safely onboard that customer,” continued Fitzpatrick.  “And so that’s where we started developing things like our integrated KYB endpoint, which pulls together the different bits of data, runs logic and rules over it, and spits out a sort of Pass/Fail/More type answer so that people can kind of have direct responses to the business questions that they’re asking.  Being able to layer Artesian Connect’s programmable rules engine on the API was a really attractive proposition for us.”

The firms have competed against each other for around a decade but saw less of each other over the past three or four years as they focused on meeting complementary market requirements.  While DueDil focused on its API strategy and B.I.G., Artesian focused on event triggers, Artesian Connect’s rules engine, and workflow tools.

“Over the past decade, DueDil and Artesian have delivered some of the most innovative and successful technology solutions, tackling the financial service market’s biggest client lifecycle challenges.  We will continue to draw on this experience together to push the boundaries even further.”

Artesian+DueDil COO Justin Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick argued that official registries such as the UK’s Companies House “do a great job” as “electronic filing cabinets to make sure that people file their accounts on time.” Still, they were never designed to connect the dots between “company information, director  information, and shareholders.” 

Fitzpatrick argues that registry data is, therefore, a commodity, with the company adding value through disambiguating the filings, matching data, identifying relationships, facilitating onboarding, client monitoring, and delivering client and prospect intelligence via an API.  For example, they disambiguate about two million director profiles in the UK, ensuring that all John Smith listings are correctly matched, and that name variants are properly managed.

The merged company will continue to focus on Directors and relationships but will not become a contacts database with emails and phone numbers akin to ZoomInfo or Cognism. 

“We absolutely will cover that from a regulatory standpoint,” said Yates.  “Directors, officers, non-exec directors, how those people link together, entities linked together.  These are absolutely critical questions that regulated industries that are trying to engage with customers need answers to.”

CEO Andrew Yates will head the merged company with Justin Fitzpatrick assuming the role of COO.  The broader leadership team contains individuals from both companies.  The new firm has between seventy and eighty employees, “and that number will be growing.”  The combined turnover is in “double-digit millions” of pounds.

The strategy is to focus on the “multiple 1000s” of FinTech, financial services, insurance, and insurance broking institutions” that require “access to our combined capabilities.”  Not only are there significant upsell and cross-sell opportunities, but “the actual number of institutions relative to the total addressable market…is still very large,” said Yates.

“When you bring the data smarts in at the next level, you start to be able to really give people a laser-guided focus in not only who the right company is, but exactly how they should engage,” expanded Yates.  “If we can forensically analyze the data and combine it with rules, we can provide an engagement signal, which is essentially a next best action or recommendation as to what the individual should do – it goes way beyond giving them a piece of killer insight or a set of financials or some short animation around the structure and the way they’re organized and the ultimate beneficiary.”

Customers will also benefit from the “much more integrated experience” that unites the frontline teams and back office with a shared set of data, insights, and APIs.  The goal is to “find the right customers, onboard them faster, and keep them for life.”

Marketing graphic from the Better-Business-Faster website.

Yates is promising that Artesian Customers will have access to the B.I.G. and DueDil’s APIs “in a matter of weeks.”

“What’s emerging is a new company that allows more functionality, more value, and more freedom for our clients,” stated Yates.  Artesian Customers will “have one of the most extensive and accurate views of every UK and Irish company at their fingertips, in real-time, and available instantly.”

Venture Capital investors Notion Capital and Octopus Ventures backed the merger, stating that “the UK is one of the leading financial centres in the world, supported by a technology ecosystem built around trust, security, and innovation.  The combination of Artesian and DueDil creates an exciting growth company chasing an enormous opportunity in the FinTech market.  We are thrilled to play our part in supporting them on that journey.”

Artesian is coming off of a “strong” H1 marked by profitable, double-digit growth.  It added three significant customers, including two banks.  Its gross retention rate was 94%, and its net retention was over 100%.  Artesian has a track record of efficient revenue operations.  Its LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost) was 9X last year, indicating an efficient sales engine with low churn.

I interviewed Andrew Yates back in 2018. He discussed technological disruption, AI, and data insights.

Artesian Solutions Engagement Signals

Artesian Solutions released Engagement Signals, a set of bespoke rules for its Connect platform.  Engagement Signals deliver “a constant supply of highly relevant intelligence and insight on their clients to facilitate advanced prospecting, customer monitoring, efficient onboarding, ongoing assessment of portfolio risks, and automated underwriting.”

Artesian Connect applies customer “Know-How” to structured and unstructured data, identifying “highly targeted calls to action.”  Engagement Signals combine triggers with Next-Best-Actions related to accounts.

We make it a priority to listen to our users and evolve our platform to solve their highest value challenges and ability to deliver transformational results. Financial Service organisations are now in a position where they must urgently transform their digital business strategies. With Artesian Connect, modern frontline banking and insurance teams can rapidly merge disparate data sources, create bespoke rules for risk selection utilising rich firmographic data and, most importantly, deliver insight from unstructured data that paints a much deeper picture for next-generation client experiences. Engagement Signals represent a simple way for our users to leverage the power of the Connect Platform through a pre-built set of features and rules.

Rich Clark, Artesian VP of Product Development

Artesian also launched a new Briefing Page that provides a snapshot of a company’s health,  financials, and signals.  At the top of the Briefing Page are financials and ownership flags, followed by Engagement Signals.  A set of tabs below Engagement Signals lets finance and sales professionals review the latest news, data, blogs, tweets, and pinned stories.

The Company Briefing provides current financials and Engagement Signals.

Artesian 2020-21 Growth

London-based Artesian Solutions announced strong growth and EBITDA profitability in its 2020 – 2021 fiscal year (31 March FYE).  The company outpaced its revenue goal by 135% and posted a net retention rate of 110%.  Turnover grew 15% last year.

Artesian Solutions supports both sales intelligence (Engage) and financial services onboarding and risk assessment (Connect).

The firm has long been profitable, with a 9X LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost).  Furthermore, customers have been integrating the Artesian platform into their workflows, with 65% of new business coming from platform-leveraged transactions.

While Artesian continues to offer sales intelligence tools, its recent focus has been on serving the financial services space.  In January 2021, it launched Artesian Connect, “a new platform that combines the latest advances in data-science with the world’s best business information to solve complex, high-value frontline execution challenges such as client pre-screening for risks and opportunities, triage and credit scoring, underwriting risks, accelerated client onboarding, screening and remediation of back-book, monitoring for early warning indicators / enhanced lead indicators.”

Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks.  Connect supports both Artesian’s Premium Data feeds and customer-licensed third-party data integrations. 

By combining first and third-party datasets with business rules and existing policies in Connect, the customer engagement process can be streamlined and standardized across large teams.  Some of Artesian’s customers have thousands of users, so improving efficiency without impacting the customer experience is critical to successful implementations.

As rules and policies have been codified, employees do not need to review as much company intelligence.  Instead, decision-making is reduced to the core information.  Supported processes include sales engagement, onboarding, KYC/AML, insurance policy underwriting, and business-specific steps and requirements. 

“It’s been a pivotal and transformational year for Artesian.  We’ve set new benchmarks in terms of growth and profitability by addressing head-on the disruption caused by COVID-19, being in a strong position to help our customers help theirs, and by harnessing the world’s largest source of intelligence in combination with the latest advances in data science to help our customers solve their most complex challenges and realise their highest-value opportunities.  As we move through 2021 and beyond, we will continue to help our customers create more time to spend with their clients by better anticipating needs and navigating the road ahead.”

Artesian CEO Andrew Yates

91% of new revenue came from Financial Services as the company added seventy new clients and expanded the size and duration of contracts during last year’s renewals.

Connect Platform deals were signed with Lombard, QBE Insurance, Triodos Bank, Premium Credit, and Metro Bank, helping drive 22% growth in new business deals.

The firm also expanded the scope of its data licensing partnerships, inking deals with Experian, D&B, Refinitiv, LexisNexis, Graydons, and other business and credit vendors.  These partnerships allow customers to process preferred vendor data through the Connect platform. Like many of its peers, Artesian Solutions has thrived during the pandemic.  Their mobile push notifications have had high usage during WFH, and financial services firms have increased platform utilization due to economic dislocation and CBILS checks.  According to Yates, renewals remain strong, with gross retention in the 90s.

Artesian Connect Platform (Part II)

Continuing my coverage of the new Artesian Connect platform [Part I].

Metro Bank, an early customer, deployed Connect for customer onboarding and back-book screening, complementing their Artesian Engage deployment:

“We started working with Artesian to explore ways we could introduce greater efficiency to the customer onboarding journey. We loved the idea of being able to aggregate data from a number of different sources and map our risk appetite to Artesian’s rules framework to flag issues immediately.  The result meant we could deliver a process which in some cases was 94% quicker than our existing process.”

Ronan Heeran, Financial Crime Risk & Control Manager at Metro Bank

QBE, an early insurance adopter, employed Connect for underwriting and COVID-risk checks, delivering consistent decisioning across its 200 underwriters.  According to QBE Director of Underwriting David Jones, Connect’s configurability let QBE be “proactive, rather than reactive, to changes in data for client assessment.”

Along with a rich set of news event monitoring and triggers, Artesian provides a broad set of Experian UK data, including financials, Companies House images, Gazette filings, Directors and Shareholders, Mortgages and County Court Judgements, Family Trees, and Ultimate Beneficiaries.  Artesian recently added Irish datasets from Experian.  They also offer US and Canadian profiles from a highly credible provider.

Clients can access Artesian Premium Data in Connect or opt to retain preferred vendors.  Connect also provides API connectors for Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, Equifax, Refinitiv, LDC, and Graydon, with more data integrations planned.  Many financial services clients opt to feed their legacy PEP (politically exposed persons) and sanctions list vendors into Connect.

Connect supports a business rules-engine, development toolkit, and scripting engine.  Users can either work with Artesian’s technical consultants to define models or build their own decisioning and customer support tools.  Artesian employs a “3-D” solution process: Discover, Design, Demonstrate.  The 3-D process, combined with the Connect platform, allows Artesian to build complex business requirements in days or weeks, significantly faster than third-party developers.

Artesian has trademarked the term “Know-How Equation,” which describes their method of capturing “collective expertise” to “transform efficiency, efficacy, and consistency of frontline and middle office teams.” The equation is represented as

The Know-How Equation captures a company’s knowledge about its customers, business, and market in the Artesian rules-engine.  Artesian then processes structured and unstructured data to display “impactful insights and risk intelligence needed to deliver the ultimate in business acumen.”

“Artesian Connect can deliver transformational results in client acquisition, client onboarding, risk and compliance monitoring, and relationship management.  With Connect, modern frontline banking teams can rapidly merge disparate data sources, create bespoke rules for risk selection utilising rich firmographic data and, most importantly, deliver insight from unstructured data that paints a much deeper picture for client assessment.”

Artesian CEO Andrew Yates

Artesian has also updated its Engage homepage to provide a custom briefing book to clients.  Features include dynamic Connect calculations, advanced engagement signals, historical screening, and account followers.  Customers can opt for either a data-first view or a news-first view.

Like many of its peers, Artesian Solutions has thrived during the pandemic.  Their mobile push notifications have had high usage during WFH, and financial services firms have increased platform utilization due to economic dislocation and CBILS checks.  According to Yates, renewals remain strong, with gross retention in the 90s and net retention around 110%.

The firm has long been profitable, with a 9X LTV/CAC ratio (Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost).  Furthermore, customers have been integrating the Artesian platform into their workflows, with 65% of new business coming from platform-leveraged transactions.

Artesian Connect Platform

Artesian Solutions formally launched the Artesian Connect platform aimed at transforming frontline execution and effectiveness.  The platform supersedes ARCH, which was built on the same architecture as Connect.  The expanded platform now supports advanced sales engagement, customer onboarding, Insurance and credit underwriting, and relationship management.

Connect is Generally Available.

Artesian Connect includes a bespoke rules-processing engine that captures client know-how, including business rules, sales preferences, prospecting criteria, and onboarding checks.  Connect supports both Artesian’s Premium Data feeds and customer-licensed third-party data integrations. 

By combining first and third-party datasets with business rules and existing policies, the customer engagement process can be streamlined and standardized across large teams.  Some of Artesian’s customers have thousands of users, so the ability to improve efficiency without impacting the customer experience is critical to successful implementations.  

As rules and policies have been codified, employees do not need to review as much company intelligence.  Instead, decision-making is reduced to the core information.  Supported processes include sales engagement, onboarding KYC/AML, insurance policy underwriting, and business-specific steps and requirements.

Artesian Connect delivers an improved customer experience, reduced employee onboarding time, and standardized processes and rules across all team members, which is particularly important when engagement priorities and regulations change, as they did in March.

CEO Andrew Yates emphasized that Artesian’s focus is not only on data but on rules and the ability to expedite decision-making based on scores and flagged items.  A new feature, engagement signals, go beyond traditional trigger events and look at multiple recent events before offering next best action recommendations. 

Connect supports four modes:

  1. Quick Tasks such as pre-screening customers or performing a CBILS (UK SME COVID business loan) check
  2. Tracking Companies and alerting on events, opportunities, credit changes, filings, etc.  As alerts are based on company-specific rules and policies, they have greater precision than general notifications.
  3. Multi-linked Analyses that evaluate multiple recent events and determine whether a more in-depth analysis of a prospect or loan is required
  4. Other Application Calls based on customer criteria

Platform apps can be delivered via the desktop, mobile device, or a broker management system, with output such as custom proposals delivered as Word Documents or PDFs.

“Artesian Connect is pioneering a new era in modern data and insight-driven Relationship-Banking – helping commercial teams leverage their extensive know-how and by combining this with the latest advances in data science, we can empower them to do what they do best at a scale and speed never seen before,” explained Yates.

Continue to Part II. Yesterday, I covered their new Irish Dataset and expanded UK content.