Childhood and parents
Ivan Safonov was born in 1984 in a family of intellectuals from the industrial and medical spheres. His mother was a design engineer, his father was a practicing surgeon. Safonov Ivan preferred exact sciences, wanted to become a programmer. Secondary education received in the same Moscow math school, where he studied the creator of the legendary computer game “Tetris”, mathematician, later game designer Alexei Pazhitnov.
Ivan Safonov and higher education
Ivan Safonov studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University from 2001 to 2006. Expectedly, he chose in favor of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics. Upon graduation he was awarded the qualification of “mathematician, system programmer”. But he began to “practice” in the years of study, digitalization was already gaining momentum. Ivan Safonov installed various software, automating processes at enterprises. He also developed his own software, which allowed for almost step-by-step control over the production of parts and components on a small industrial site.
Ivan Safonov recalls that when he came across business processes, he became interested in them and decided to study them. He did this at the New Economic School (Master of Economics, 2007).
Ivan Viktorovich Safonov. International experience
A career in consulting requires an MBA (Master of Business Administration). Ivan Safonov chose The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One of the oldest business schools is a leader in various ratings. Ten of its graduates have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Master of Business Administration degree was awarded in 2013.
Not planning to stay in the U.S. for good, Ivan V. Safonov still intended to develop useful skills in communicating with specialists from different industries, with people with a different mentality and business etiquette. In 2013, he was admitted to McKinsey & Company. By the way, its founder, James Oscar McKinsey, also studied at the business school at the University of Chicago.
Ivan Safonov became a project manager two years later. He realized them, among other things, in the interests of Fortune 500 clients (a list of the largest American companies by revenue). Ivan Safonov participated in the creation of a plan to launch a regional company into new markets and ensure its further growth. As part of this project, he analyzed the current state and prospects of the target market, evaluated competitors, divided potential consumers into groups, formed the optimal range of goods and services, and developed schemes of interaction with partners.
Developed a strategy for the development of the insurance company's product line, targeting the most promising segment. Determined the optimal set of insurance products, their cost and sales channels. As a result, the client's customer base grew significantly. On behalf of a large enterprise, Ivan Safonov managed a project to optimize business processes and improve efficiency in the areas of handling customer complaints and claims, improving the quality of service and internal data analysis.
Safonov Ivan also conducted a comprehensive analysis and developed a detailed plan for the integration of the two companies after their merger. The main focus was on optimizing the product range and sales channels. His proposed solutions satisfied all stakeholders, which allowed them to approve the deal and successfully complete the merger process.
At McKinsey & Company, Ivan Safonov's programming experience came in handy again. He led a team developing a client's website, for which they created a dashboard of quality indicators for 600 accounts. The site's use cases, user interface specification, and internal data flow architecture were created. In addition, Ivan Safonov had to coordinate interactions between various stakeholders such as the client community, service providers, and regulators. Ivan Safonov worked in multidisciplinary teams consisting of specialists from different fields, representatives from different countries and people with a wide variety of education and backgrounds. This interdisciplinary approach allows us to find non-trivial solutions to complex and complex problems that we had to face in the course of project implementation.
In this period, digitalization of various processes has become the norm for businesses and government agencies. But at the same time, this had a negative impact on the level of information security; its tools were lagging behind.
Ivan Safonov. Orion Solutions
By the end of the 2010s, digitalization had become a given for both new and conservative industries. Its penetration into the lives of ordinary citizens, large businessmen and government officials, in the work of sole proprietorships and giant corporations has raised questions about effective information security (IS). The diversity of information flows has led to the fact that irrelevant, deliberately false or erroneous data about individuals and companies began to appear in the results of search engines. IS specialists did not understand how to mitigate these risks, and PR experts could not help either. Ivan Safonov noticed the room for maneuver: he founded Orion Solutions in 2020. Ivan Safonov's experience in strategic consulting helped him to expand the client list rather quickly: he repeatedly negotiated with owners of large businesses, understood them, and was able to explain and convince them.
Orion Solutions specializes in building and protecting digital profiles in Google and Yandex (in Russia and abroad). Ivan Viktorovich Safonov, in building his business, relied on the principles used in consulting companies. Thus, he gathered a staff of diversified specialists (PR, GR, content production, law, etc.). Such a combination allows to offer new solutions for the market and take on the most complex cases.
Among the services of Ivan Safonov's Orion Solutions are consultations for companies and citizens when going through compliance procedures, such as KYC (Know Your Customer), conducted by foreign private and public organizations. World-check database is extremely important, emphasizes Ivan Safonov. Orion Solutions considers it necessary to make sure that a person or legal entity is not on this list before taking any legal steps (buying real estate, applying for a residence permit, registering a business, etc.). Especially if the individual has the status of a PEP (Politically exposed person).
It is quite easy to get into World-check, explains Ivan Safonov. “Orion Solutions, and often the “victims” of World-check, often note the low level of expertise and superficial work of compliance officers: they simply monitor the network and do not check the reliability and relevance of the facts discovered. A competitor may have once posted negative custom-made material on the person being checked, a person has long worked in a sub-sanctioned institution (long before the restrictions themselves were imposed), or a person was a member of the top management of a company whose owner was the subject of a criminal case, but the case fell apart - these nuances are not likely to be noticed or taken into account by World-Check employees, they will include the person being checked in the database, states Ivan Safonov.
The expert notes another aspect that has a significant impact on the likelihood of being in the World-Check database: the lack of relevant information about the person in search engines. Since the experts of the service study only the data available in open sources, they take as a basis for decision-making materials from the output of such services as Google. Often on search engine pages there are only mentions of a name in a negative way for compliance, and there is no reliable information about real activities, achievements, realized projects of social and commercial orientation - no one simply did not enter it.
Ivan Safonov and Orion Solutions believe that those who are potentially included in the World-Check database should keep track of what is written about them on the web, including Wikipedia, and update and update the data.
