Griffins, an insolvency and forensic services firm with operations in London and Dubai, is using IBM Big Data analytics software.

Griffins has one of the largest teams of dedicated investigators, covering both insolvency and financial investigation in the UK. In addition to handling forensic investigation and litigation, it provides support services for creditors, debtors and professional advisers. The IBM technology has moved it from struggling with huge amounts of information stored in spreadsheets (in excess of 10 Terabytes) to a faster, more accurate, intelligence-led approach that helps solve cases related to money laundering, missing trader fraud and theft of company assets. Many of the cases Griffins handle are tracing the proceeds of crime which involves analysing structured and unstructured data sources such as bank statements, pdf files, emails, invoices and spreadsheets, establishing patterns and relationships, and making non-obvious connections between disparate sources of data.

“The IBM technology has given us a significant edge over our competitors in our ability to perform investigative analysis faster and with greater accuracy than other firms involved in the same investigations,” says Stephen Hunt, insolvency practitioner at Griffins. “For example, an international bank’s computer was seized during a criminal investigation. From the partial data available to us for civil claims, we were able to extract highly accurate patterns and make connections during our investigative analysis which led the tax authorities to query how we had obtained our information. The speed by which we were able to accurately present and demonstrate the results of the investigation was remarkable in terms of impact.”

Hunt continues: “We think the IBM technology has a lot of future potential for our business as a critical support tool because of its ability to do the thinking for us. We plan to create a problem solving package by developing algorithms that will answer the top five questions that often get missed in investigations. This will free up our professionals to do the rest elevating us above our competitors in our ability to perform more accurate and faster investigative analyses.”

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