How Cognism Beats All Benchmarks For Comply Advantage

The UK’s leading anti-money laundering technology company uses Cognism’s sales intelligence platform to:

• Increase conversion rate by 15%.
• Obtain high-quality mobile numbers in the US and EMEA.
• Book 10% of new business meetings with Cognism data.
• Reduce email bounce rate to 6%.

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The company

ComplyAdvantage is an AI-driven financial crime risk technology powered by ComplyData, the world’s hyperscale source of financial risk insight. 

Working with the likes of Santander, Affirm and Gemini, their ethos to customers is that compliance doesn’t have to be painful. Businesses need real-time financial crime insight to put them in control.

The platform enables firms to understand the real risk of who they’re doing business with, through the world's only global, real-time risk database of people and companies. The technology actively identifies tens of thousands of risk events from millions of structured and unstructured data points - every single day.

The challenge

We interviewed Jonny Fianu, Global Head of Revenue Operations at ComplyAdvantage, supporting four offices in London, New York, Singapore and Cluj. 

What data gaps did they intend to fill with Cognism?

“Purchasing Cognism was tied to improving the B2B data that supported our account-based marketing efforts. The objective of the team was to increase the breadth and depth of accounts and contacts.”

Jonny explained how ComplyAdvantage uses Cognism in conjunction with multiple B2B data providers to complement their lead generation efforts.

“We use multiple data vendors to ensure that we provide our teams with the highest-quality data. We’re very aware that different solutions will have their own strengths and weaknesses, so for this reason we’ve opted for a multi-vendor play.”

What other data companies do they use alongside Cognism?

“Our current stack comprises ZoomInfo, Lusha and Cognism. We use Tray.io as a data orchestration layer; this allows us to connect to each provider via an API and to source accounts and contacts from them.”

“When bringing Cognism back into the stack we also looked at other prospective companies that operate in the space, such as Seamless.ai and Salesintel. However, we decided to partner with Cognism due to the vast quality and coverage of the dataset for our target segments.” 

Jonny described the data assessment techniques they undertook in the vendor evaluation process.

“One of the anchor points of a mission-based team is that you look at any new assessment as an experiment. This means we set out clear expectations and benchmarks on bad data, email bounce rates, and phone disqualification rates.” 

“The team spent the first year testing different databases and enrichment tools against each other. At this stage of the project Cognism was not in the picture.”

“However, through conducting this analysis, we identified clear gaps in our data quality. That’s when we decided to get Cognism and plug those gaps.”

What results did they find from sampling Cognism’s data? 

“When investigating Cognism and testing its data, we found it to be very strong on coverage and telephone numbers in our core markets. So we made the decision to bring Cognism in and double down on it.”

The solution

At ComplyAdvantage, the Revenue Operations team owns the Cognism piece but this sits within the multidisciplinary mission-based team. This means sales and marketing are also heavily involved.

What is their target market? 

“We use Cognism to primarily target money-laundering and compliance decision-makers in medium to large challenger banks, blockchain, trading, payment and cryptocurrency businesses in EMEA and US. Our ideal client is a mid-market Fintech organisation.” 

How long did it take the Revenue Operations team to start using the platform? 

“With Cognism, you can be up and running straight away! However, due to the nature of the system we’re building we required a connection to the Salesforce API. This took a couple of weeks. We wanted to invest this time up-front in order to set us up for the future state vision we had.”

Jonny praised how useful the account management services have been to the initial platform set-up. 

“We’ve had a great experience working with the Cognism team; they’re very consultative. This is more important than a lot of companies realise; there’s a lot that a customer may forgive if they have a strong relationship with the organisation.” 

What Cognism products do the sales team use? 

“As well as adding Cognism into our master data system, we have also given Chrome Extension and WebApp licences to the sales reps. The US and EMEA teams’ feedback has been very positive.”

Jonny told us more about the positive impact Cognism’s data has had on the business.

“The sales team’s favourite things are a powerful combination of mobile numbers and the volumes of results! It is ‘chalk and cheese’ compared to what we were used to historically and our experiences with other partners and established players in this space. Coverage is wider. Email bounce rates are lower. Mobile phone numbers are substantially better quality.”

Jonny explained how Cognism's data quality has surpassed their expectations.

"Our bounce rate benchmark is 7%, Cognism comes in at 6%. Our conversion rate benchmark is 14%, Cognism comes in at 29%. Having high-quality data is not a nice to have, it's a must have." 

The results

We asked Jonny about the opportunities Cognism has delivered for ComplyAdvantage. 

“We saw the results immediately! After adding Cognism to our system we could see the impact of it right away. It was beating all the benchmarks.”

“Overall, our sales team books at least 10% of new business meetings with Cognism.”

What growth plans does ComplyAdvantage have with Cognism? 

“The future state will involve automation. The plan is that all the databases are connected through Tray.io. When a sales team member inputs a request through the system, the best quality contact and account data is sourced and supplied. The data would be tagged, recording where it came from (which supplier for that request had the best data point), and then there would also be a bad data loop back into the system.”

“This would allow us to know, on a contact-by-contact basis, why that contact's email may have bounced. Over time the system would improve by learning which databases are most valuable to us in a particular segment or region.”

Jonny concluded that: 

"Today we’re able to measure bad data trends over time. These trends show that Cognism is our most consistent provider of quality phone numbers without any degradation."

"Cognism is our lead platform in our lead gen stack." 

Try Cognism’s sales intelligence solution

Over 1,000 revenue teams around the world trust Cognism to:

✅ Build qualified B2B contact databases

✅ Plan and launch their outbound campaigns

✅ Power up their social selling

✅ Meet and beat their revenue targets

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