Case Study: Serious Fraud Office expedites complex, data-intensive investigations with OpenText Axcelerate (OpenText)

Serious Fraud Office uses artificial intelligence in the fight against crime

The Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the UK agency that investigates and prosecutes large-scale fraud, bribery and corruption, faced exploding data volumes that made traditional document review impractical — from the Panama Papers (10.5M documents) to cases of 30–60M and potentially 100M documents. Manual review would take years (a team of 10 would need three years to review 2M documents), so the SFO needed a defensible, user-friendly way to cut through vast, evolving datasets and surface the evidence that matters.

The SFO implemented OpenText Axcelerate, an AI-driven eDiscovery platform with predictive coding, continuous learning, analytics, visualization and a concept browser to group related content. The solution simplified and sped document review, automatically identifying and categorizing relevant materials, prioritizing review throughput (100,000+ documents/day), and increasing investigator and prosecutor efficiency — accelerating investigations and becoming embedded in the SFO’s investigation process.

Serious Fraud Office

Richard Day

Head of eDiscovery