ClientEarth is a global charity which litigates against organisations doing harm to the environment. The philanthropy team had received approval to launch a new corporate fundraising strategy. However, partnering with the wrong corporation is ClientEarth’s most significant reputational risk, so they needed to conduct stringent due diligence.

ClientEarth didn’t have a single dedicated prospect researcher in the team whose job it was to conduct this due diligence and provide reports to fundraisers. They needed a tool that could be put straight into the hands of fundraisers. This tool needed to conduct in-depth research, particularly around a corporation’s links to environmental concerns, whether directly or indirectly through third parties such as the company owners and directors, as well as their supply chain. If done manually, this would have taken hours for each due diligence report, significantly slowing down the fundraising process.

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The development team’s due diligence process involved a template with specific information requirements. Each team member would manually search for this information online, which meant carefully researching and reviewing news articles, Wikipedia, and company websites one by one, before analysing and summarising the findings.  

This was time-consuming, taking half or day—or sometimes an entire day—to compile a report to the expected standard. There was also the risk of human error. Individuals might overlook critical details, leading to variations in quality depending on who was doing the research. This lack of uniformity made sharing the information with senior leadership a challenging task. 

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Dartmouth College’s donor prospect management team conducts thorough research on over a thousand potential donors every year. This helps protect the college’s academic leadership, board members, and overall organisation from reputational risks.

The analysts used to use Google as the primary research tool and distributed lengthy PDF reports to committees which caused delays in fundraising efforts.
Now analysts use Xapien. They simply enter the prospect’s name and press go. Detailed, readable, and easily shareable reports are ready in under ten minutes. Xapien surfaces any potential reputational risks so analysts can focus on providing strategy and advice, and not just gathering information.

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The Royal National Lifeboat Institution conducts background research on all corporate partners, trusts and major suppliers to protect the organisation from risks. Conducting manual research using search engines and databases can lead to bias in the results due to a user’s preferences and past searches. By using Xapien to conduct background research, the RNLI obtain unbiased results and uncover all the reputational risks, not just the first few pages of a search engine.

For example, the RNLI was looking to partner with an extreme sports safety equipment company. Manual searches didn’t find anything of concern. But then a Xapien search revealed several class action lawsuits in USA and Canada relating to faulty equipment. The RNLI didn’t want to partner with any company that didn’t uphold the highest standards of user safety.

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Griffin is creating the bank you can build on with an API-first, full-stack Banking as a Service platform. Compliance is a key offering so it’s vital that Griffin upholds industry best practices in its own third party risk management. It used to take at least a day to perform due diligence on every prospect, or supplier. This held back business growth.

Thanks to Xapien, enhanced due diligence on the directors of prospect companies and suppliers have gone from a resource-intensive one-day process to detailed evidence-based reports in under 12 minutes. The insights provided by the compliance team are shared with sales teams within hours, not days, so Griffin can get on with building a rapidly scaling business.

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The University would conduct extensive prospect research and cultivate the relationship until a certain point where they would ask for a gift. At that stage, if something adverse came up in due diligence it could create a complicated situation for the fundraisers to unwind. Moreover, they’d already invested a large amount of time and effort into a gift they’d then have to turn down.  

Xapien optimised the operations team's process by building due diligence into prospect research from the start. Instead of spending hours on manual research, Xapien surfaces all relevant information about a prospect in minutes. This means due diligence can be done upfront without holding up the prospect research process. By combining the two processes early on, it helps the fundraising team focus their efforts on which prospects to approach for donations. 

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Zurich conducts thorough investigations on Commercial Companies as part of their operations. The process involves collecting data from multiple records to validate policy responses and ensure accurate risk assessments. This used to be a time-consuming, labour-intensive process.

With Xapien’s AI-powered technology, Zurich’s claims investigations team gather comprehensive corporate information about individuals in 10 minutes. Zurich uses these reports to make quick, confident decisions about all investigation subjects, protecting the institution from risk.

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KaurMaxwell needed a tool capable of conducting thorough web searches to strengthen their KYC checks. While its lawyers already conducted PEPs and sanction checks, these sources are limited in scope and didn’t protect the firm from wider reputational and regulatory risks. But they have a small team and couldn’t afford the time commitment for a more comprehensive search. They need to build the business.

Xapien bridges the gap. In minutes, it surfaces information that would have taken days or weeks to sift through. This gives its lawyers a fully sourced and summarised due diligence report giving an upfront view of a client’s background and risk profile. This enables confident, fast decision-making on all onboarding decisions.

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The donor due diligence process involves different teams collaborating. First, the prospect research team delves into a prospect's background, while the fundraising team examines and sends requests for additional investigation. Afterwards, the due diligence team carries out a personalised background check and risk assessment, which can take up to two days. But the real challenge starts when concerns arise after a relationship has been established. At that point, a significant amount of resources has already been invested in the process.  

Xapien's automated background reports provide a full picture of any person or organisation, anywhere in the world, in 5 to 10 minutes. The platform reads and analyses data from across the internet to deliver consolidated, insightful reports including flagged risks, wealth estimates, assets, and associates. By integrating due diligence with prospect research, the two processes work hand in hand instead of holding each other back. Armed with this knowledge, Cambridge University can confidently move forward with fundraising, knowing they have a solid understanding of their prospects.  

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The Operations team had one Research Assistant carrying out the entirety of their prospect research, which carried a lot of unnecessary risk. While great at finding information, the researcher didn’t have enough experience to interpret and assess various risks and there was a risk they might something. The research process was also entirely manual, which was time-consuming and, in some cases, patchy. The researcher would end up spending most of the time looking up information on databases and search engines, and then writing up the results, leaving little time for analysis and interpretation. 

Xapien alleviated all these risks by automating the fact finding. Now, Paula and her team spend more time interpreting the risks that Xapien surfaces and categorises rather than collating the findings. They’ve gone from 4 to 5 hours of reading hundreds of articles online to running a comprehensive report in 15 minutes. Paula’s team can deliver value to the rest of the organisation by adding strategic advice on top of their insights. They stopped wasting time on less problematic cases at the outset and instead prioritised risky subjects and developed strategies for how the University could deal with them. 

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The Prospect Research Manager, being the sole researcher at Sightsavers, is responsible for all research and due diligence checks. This research, whether it’s a quick review or in-depth investigation, would often take a couple of hours to an entire day or even longer. In turn this this would cause delays to fundraisers being able to commence stewardship and delays in the delivery of bespoke research projects. 

Integrating Xapien into the workflow has proven to be a game changer for the Prospect Research Manager, enabling them to handle multiple research and due diligence requests with remarkable efficiency and speed.

Xapien has become an indispensable research tool eliminating the need to dedicate entire days to due diligence research. This has resulted in quicker approval and grant processes and fostered better relationships with potential donors.

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The Museum of London has a small team of three who manage the entire advancement practice and only one person who is responsible for their entire research function. The Museum does not have a large existing pool of donors that they can leverage. They needed to scale the fundraising efforts rapidly, with limited resources.

Ciara FitzGerald-Graham, the Museum's Fundraising Intelligence Manager, adopted Xapien for her research and due diligence. With Xapien's AI-generated reports, she gets comprehensive due diligence results in minutes, not days. This saves her time and lets her focus on prospecting and scaling their fundraising efforts.

Bonus: Running a Xapien report provides the team with an extra layer of security that all risks have been checked, protecting the organisation from reputational risk.

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Hopehead were using a variety of databases and tools for their due diligence process, but their team had to manually search the open web to piece together a picture of an individual or organisation. It was a time-consuming and challenging process, and there was always the risk they might miss something.

With Xapien's on-demand research tool, Hopehead are confident they've thoroughly searched through every relevant piece of information on the open web. What used to take up to 4 hours now takes around 30 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes to review and extract relevant information for the final report.

Bonus: Xapien adds an extra level of assurance to Hopehead’s scoping process, enabling them to send out client proposals quickly and efficiently.

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The research team endeavours to dedicate as much time to proactive research—finding new prospects and exploring emerging leads—as they do to reactive research, which involves investigating existing individuals in the pipeline. However, with over 20 fundraisers to support, achieving this balance is a challenge – more time is spent responding to reactive fundraiser requests than carrying out new-name identification, which limits the organisation’s ability to expand into new areas.  

With Xapien, the information that would sometimes take the research team up to half a day to uncover through desk research can now be found in just 10 minutes. This timesaving enables research profiles to be written and delivered in half the time, freeing up researchers to engage in proactive research.  

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Given the scale of the team’s operations, they have always relied on technology to support them. Before Xapien, the firm used a different tool which would often result in more manual work than it saved. They would receive lengthy PDF reports that lacked interactivity and tended to produce false hits. The team had to sift through page after page, determining whether the information was relevant to the targeted companies and individuals. These reports typically spanned nearly 50 pages and made it challenging to discern what the direct risks were. The result was a slow process and a difficult relationship with the first line.

The firm now uses Xapien to screen portfolio companies they plan to buy. The Xapien reports take 10 minutes to run and provide early insights on risks and red flags as well as highlighting complex corporate structures. This allows the compliance team to quickly confirm if a portfolio company is suitable for a deal, and get back to the first line far quicker. They are no longer responsible for holding up the deal due to extensive background research, but can provide rapid insights early on in the cycle allowing the deal team to make more efficient decisions.  

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