Making 6,000 risk documents easy to find: a Drupal news application for ORX members

The challenge

ORX had built a reputation as a leading source of risk loss data. Because it’s owned by its members, the quality of its service is central to that reputation. It wanted to add value by making its news content easier for members to find, interpret and apply in their own organisations.

That meant dealing with volume. The news application held more than 6,000 documents on a range of topics, with new snapshots, analysis and deep dives published every day. And in a field where inaccuracies or oversights can have serious consequences, every piece had to be properly validated before members saw it, without slowing publication down.

Our approach

Financial risk analysis, increasingly known as RegTech, is a complex and specialised field. So we started by learning the domain.

Our consultants and developers ran an in-depth discovery phase with the ORX team, including its dedicated product owner. Collaborative workshops, user profile analysis, and reviews of existing documentation, design assets and infrastructure built a shared understanding of requirements and an agreed product vision. Discovery also confirmed the project’s scope and tested early ideas for the solution.

The result was more than 200 user stories and acceptance criteria. They gave the team a clear picture of what we were building and who for, and a reference point that kept development focused on members’ needs.

We built the application on Drupal, to fit ORX’s existing technology stack. Drupal provided the content management foundation, and bespoke development delivered the features ORX needed on top of it.

What we built on Drupal

• A tailored editorial workflow for the daily news snapshots, analysis and deep dives ORX publishes, making sure sensitive information is validated before it goes live.
• Bespoke advanced search that lets members filter more than 6,000 documents by content type, currency referenced, loss amount range and more, alongside keyword and reference ID searches. Members can save the searches they run most often, so the updates most relevant to them come first.
• A near real-time news map that sizes and colours each story by focus and importance, giving members an at-a-glance view of the wider industry. It can be searched and filtered like the rest of the content, with direct links to individual stories.
• Custom single sign-on linking the news application to the main ORX membership site. It checks each member’s permissions and only takes them into the news application if their subscription includes it.

Delivery

Getting the publication workflow right mattered as much as building it. Our software consultants worked with ORX to define a process comprehensive enough to validate every document, efficient enough for daily publishing, and flexible enough to change without disrupting publication. Software testing was part of the project from the start.

The outcome

Global member engagement rose by 40%. Members can get to the content they need more easily and quickly, filtering a large archive by the attributes that matter to them and saving the searches they run most, while the news map gives them an at-a-glance view of the wider risk landscape.

For ORX’s members, that means more confidence in their knowledge of emerging industry events and their own exposure to risk, which helps them stay compliant with complex regulation.