Earlier this year, Company Watch took home three awards at the CICM British Credit Awards 2026, including Risk Management Team of the Year. It was a brilliant night, and we’re genuinely proud of the recognition. But what made the win feel particularly meaningful was what it was validating: real work, built to solve a real problem that the credit industry has been grappling with for years.
Business fraud is not a fringe concern. It is one of the most costly and persistent threats facing lenders, credit teams and risk professionals across the UK today. The average fraud incident costs businesses around £76,000. That figure alone tells you something, but it doesn’t capture the full picture: the downstream reputational damage, the regulatory scrutiny, the time lost chasing losses that should never have happened. For most organisations, the bigger question isn’t whether fraud is a risk. It’s whether they have the right tools to catch it before it lands on their books.
For a long time, the approach to detecting high-risk companies and fraudulent activity relied heavily on what we’d call point-in-time assessment. You’d screen a company at onboarding, flag anything obvious, and move on.
The problem is that the corporate landscape doesn’t stay still. Companies change. Directors move. Structures shift. And by the time a lender circles back for a periodic review, the risk that should have been caught has often already crystallised.
Anyone working in credit risk will recognise the scenario. You pull up a company, the data looks fine, you proceed. Six months later, it turns out that company had already started showing the kind of behavioural patterns that tend to precede default or deliberate fraud.
The signals were there. Nobody was watching closely enough to see them. That’s the gap we set out to close.
Building a continuous monitoring layer
Vigilance™ 2.0 is our fraud monitoring layer, deployed continuously across the entire UK company population. Not a periodic screen. Not a manual review triggered by a specific event. A live, always-on system designed to identify abnormal behavioural patterns as they emerge, across 25 distinct behavioural categories.
Right now, Vigilance™ 2.0 identifies active risk indicators in over 482,000 UK companies. That’s roughly 9% of the entire company population showing at least one flag that warrants closer attention.
To put that in context: if you’re managing a portfolio of any meaningful size, the statistical likelihood that some of those companies have already been flagged is high. The question is whether you know about it.
The categories Vigilance™ 2.0 monitors cover a broad and deliberately specific range of fraud-related behaviours. More than 45,000 companies are currently connected to potential phoenix activity, where businesses fold and resurface under new names but with familiar faces at the helm. Over 100,000 cases involve default Companies House address use, a well-documented signal in business fraud risk assessment.
Additionally, there are more than 20,000 instances of multiple or cloned account filings, and over 18,000 cases involving possible non-compliant Persons of Significant Control, which matters enormously for anyone trying to get clear sight of ownership structures before making a credit decision.
These aren’t theoretical risk categories. They’re the patterns that fraud investigators and credit analysts have consistently identified as early warning signs. What Vigilance™ 2.0 does is automate the detection of those patterns at scale, in near real-time, so that the alert reaches your workflow before the exposure lands on your balance sheet.
Risk flagged by Vigilance™ 2.0 on the Company Watch platform.
What good fraud prevention software actually looks like
There’s a lot of noise in the market right now around fraud prevention software and detection tools. Some of it is useful. A lot of it overpromises. In our experience, the most effective tools for preventing financial fraud in a growing company, or indeed a large lending institution, share a few characteristics.
First, they work from strong, clean data. Screening UK companies for fraud risk during due diligence is only as good as the underlying data you’re working from. That’s why we’ve invested significantly in integrating new ECCTA developments and specialist risk datasets into our platform, closing gaps in credit assessment that were leaving real blind spots for lenders. Data quality isn’t a background consideration. It’s the foundation everything else rests on.
Second, they identify suspicious company activity using filings, ownership signals and financial risk indicators together. No single data point tells the full story. A company using a default Companies House address isn’t automatically fraudulent. But a company using a default address, with anomalous filing patterns, connected to directors with a history of dissolved businesses? That combination looks very different. Good fraud detection draws those threads together.
Third, they need to be actionable. The best platforms for detecting business fraud risk in UK companies aren’t just generating reports that sit in a folder. They’re embedded in client workflows, surfacing alerts at the point of decision. Vigilance™ 2.0 alerts integrate directly into how our clients work, which means the information is useful when it’s needed, not three days after a credit decision has already been made.
The numbers behind the recognition
Part of what makes the CICM award recognition so satisfying is that it came on the back of demonstrable, measurable outcomes rather than a product roadmap or a pitch deck.
Vigilance™ 2.0 is live with 19 active client organisations, with a further 8 in trial. Across those clients, the average portfolio flag rate is around 10%. That means roughly one in ten companies in a typical portfolio is showing at least one indicator that merits further investigation.
For anyone trying to identify fraudulent or high-risk companies using UK corporate data and director history, that’s a significant signal to be working with. Our clients’ real-time feedback matters to us more than most things we could put in a brochure, because it reflects what the product is actually doing in practice, not what we hoped it might do in theory.
Vigilance™ 2.0 in Action: How Radius is winning the fight against fraud
Here’s how Company Watch became the tool the Radius team relies on every single day.
Screening, due diligence and the onboarding problem
One of the most consistent use cases we hear from credit professionals is around onboarding. Specifically: what are the best tools for screening UK companies for fraud risk during due diligence, and how do you do that efficiently when you’re processing volume?
The challenge is that thorough screening and speed feel like they’re in tension. You don’t want to slow down every application with a deep-dive investigation. But you also can’t afford to skip meaningful checks and let high-risk entities straight through. Vigilance™ 2.0 is designed to sit in that gap. Because it’s monitoring continuously and the flags are pre-built, the alert is already there when you need it. Your team isn’t starting from scratch on every application. They’re reviewing something that’s already been assessed against 25 behavioural risk categories.
For companies that are onboarding new clients and want to prevent financial fraud before it enters the portfolio, this kind of systematic pre-screening changes the risk profile materially. Catching a fraudulent or high-risk applicant at the door is significantly cheaper and less disruptive than catching them six months in.
What comes next
Winning Risk Management Team of the Year for Vigilance™ 2.0 is a genuine honour. It also raises the bar for what we build next. The economic crime landscape keeps evolving. Corporate misuse is becoming more sophisticated. The tools to combat it need to keep pace.
We’ll keep expanding the dataset, refining the behavioural categories and developing the ways Vigilance™ 2.0 integrates into client processes. Because the most effective ways to combat business fraud aren’t static, and neither are we.
If you’d like to understand more about how Vigilance™ 2.0 works, or what a typical portfolio screening might reveal about your current exposure, we’d be glad to walk you through it.
Rimsha is Marketing Executive at Company Watch, responsible for producing research-led content and insights that help organisations navigate risk and regulatory change.
