Vigil vs Red Flag Alert

What Red Flag Alert does

Red Flag Alert is a UK-focused credit risk platform. Its core product is the RISQ score — a financial health rating built from Companies House data, court judgements, gazette notices, and trade payment information. You can look up a company's score, view its financial history, and set up monitoring on a portfolio.

Red Flag Alert is particularly strong on insolvency intelligence. Its data team has built expertise in identifying UK companies showing early signs of financial distress, and its monitoring product can alert you when a company's RISQ score changes significantly. It also has good coverage of county court judgements (CCJs) and payment defaults.

It's primarily used by credit managers, trade credit insurers, and financial institutions who need to manage large portfolios of UK company risk and want a score they can act on. Pricing is typically via annual contract, with a sales process.

What Vigil does

Vigil is an event-driven monitoring service. Instead of scoring companies and alerting on score changes, it monitors Companies House directly and the London Gazette daily, and sends a plain English alert when a specific event occurs: a director change, a new charge, insolvency proceedings, or a Gazette dissolution notice.

The Gazette coverage is an area where Vigil differs meaningfully from most monitoring tools. When a company applies to be voluntarily struck off, it publishes a First Gazette Notice. Creditors have two months from that date to object. Vigil sends you the alert the same day it appears, with the deadline and a link to file form DS02. Red Flag Alert incorporates Gazette data into its scoring, but the alerting mechanism is different.

Vigil is self-serve, monthly, and designed for businesses that don't have a dedicated credit team. You sign up, add companies by name or number, and start receiving alerts. There's no sales call and no annual contract.

The practical difference

Red Flag Alert is built for organisations making credit decisions at scale — large portfolios, integration with credit insurance, risk committees, formal credit policies. The score is the product.

Vigil is built for credit controllers, account managers, and small business owners who need early warning on specific companies they already deal with. The alert is the product. You know the company; you want to know when something changes.

When to use Red Flag Alert

• You manage a large UK debtor book and need portfolio-level risk scoring
• You need CCJ and payment default data integrated into credit decisions
• Your organisation has formal credit policies that require a rated score to approve an account
• You need integration with trade credit insurance

When to use Vigil

• You need same-day London Gazette dissolution alerts on a specific watchlist
• You want to know when a director leaves a key account
• You need self-serve monthly pricing with no sales call
• You're monitoring a manageable list of customers or suppliers, not scoring thousands of companies