Pilgrims Risk Management Group

Pilgrims Risk Management Group uses Dataminr to protect people and assets for clients in some of the world’s most challenging environments. Read the case study below to learn why the UK based firm calls Dataminr “a critical tool for the SOC to carry out their function effectively.”

The editors at a major television news network are making the call—they’re flying a small production team to Somalia to cover a major, breaking news story.

One of the first phone calls they make is to London-based security consultancy Pilgrims Risk Management Group, a firm that protects people and assets for clients in some of the world’s most challenging environments.

Pilgrims quickly pulls together a small team of specialists to join the journalists and manage their security throughout the mission. On the back end, security analysts working for Pilgrims build an updated assessment of the risks the journalists will face on the ground.

The analysts reach out to their contacts working in the area, and use an array of sophisticated software solutions to verify what they’re learning. It’s fast, important work, crucial for keeping the team safe.

Dataminr forms an important building block of the security practice and tech stack at Pilgrims, providing alerts about emerging risks in real time. Analysts at Pilgrims use Dataminr alerts to augment the other sources of information that flow into their security operations centers, to build a more complete picture of risk.

“The risk assessment has to be with the team before they deploy, and the notice time can be short, perhaps a matter of hours,” said Richard Lovell-Knight, group Director of Risk at Pilgrims. “And it doesn’t stop there; the assessment instantly becomes dynamic, and continues through the mission until all are safely home.”

Pilgrims manages their own group security operations centers (SOCs) in Nigeria, Iraq, Afghanistan and the UK, providing contract security services to multiple clients. For larger clients, Pilgrims helps their clients develop bespoke SOCs tailored specifically to that client’s needs. For example, Pilgrims helped a major professional services company develop their SOC in London, which now serves the company’s 20,000 UK-based employees and global travelers.

While Pilgrims oversees the manned guarding and assessment of threats and risks to the business’s UK operations and international travelers, it also liaises with a separate global security and geopolitical risk team in the U.S., to oversee business continuity, risk assessment, crisis management and duty of care on an international scale.

The London-based SOC, which Pilgrims manages on behalf of its professional services client, runs 24 hours a day, with a team of eight analysts, a supervisor and a travel security manager. Together, this team looks for opportunities and threats through a process called “horizon scanning,” real-time notification of emerging risks using Dataminr, risk research and trends analysis.

Dataminr “fits perfectly in as a piece of the puzzle, as one of the component parts that ensures everything runs smoothly for the SOC. …It’s a critical tool for the SOC to carry out their function effectively.”
Valerie Kong, Pilgrims Group Global Manager of Risk and Information Services

Areas of risk include the obvious threats—asset protection, executive safety and travel safety—as well as incidents one would not immediately assume were related to security, such as climate-induced events that close down offices or prevent employees from getting to work.

Fast, accurate information is crucial to Pilgrims’ security practice worldwide. Dataminr’s artificial intelligence processes public information from more than 200,000 data sources, detecting the earliest indicators of emerging risks and high-impact events.

Analysts at Pilgrims use Dataminr alerts as a catalyst for fast action, in concert with other software tools and human expertise. Dataminr “fits perfectly in as a piece of the puzzle, as one of the component parts that ensures everything runs smoothly for the SOC,” said Valerie Kong, Pilgrims’ global manager of Risk and Information Services.

Kong oversaw an internal benchmarking test that measured Dataminr’s real-time alerting capabilities against other software options. Dataminr was the clear frontrunner.

Dataminr is a “critical tool for the SOC to carry out their function effectively,” Kong said.