Do You Know Your Customer?

•  Can you verify with certainty that your customer is not on a list of known terrorists, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) or other sanctioned entities?
• Do you know if the entity opening an account with you is a legitimate and active business?
• Can you verify your customers and prospects in real time across all enterprise data?
• Do you know which of your customers are potentially high-compliance risks and should be monitored for suspicious activity?

 In order to combat money laundering and the funding of terrorist activities, financial institutions are required to implement Know Your Customer (KYC) safeguards. Government regulations, such as the USA PATRIOT Act and similar KYC/AML regulations require banks to validate their customers’ identities and associations. 

A key part of KYC is determining whether a prospective customer matches any entity on the various sanctions lists. Some situations may also require an examination of possible linkages between the entity of interest and that entity’s social or business network, e.g.:

• Does the loan applicant have a non-obvious relationship with an employee, PEP or suspected terrorist organization?
• Or is an applicant somehow connected to a denied person?

 For many organizations, the data needed to effectively screen their customers exists but is distributed across various systems, locations and departments. Additionally, clerical errors, linguistic differences, and purposeful misrepresentations make it difficult for typical screening tools to find similar but inexact matches within the various data sources.

Infoglide Anti-Fraud Solution Suite overcomes these barriers to find matches and linkages between people and entities despite unintentional data entry errors and intentional attempts to mask identity and hide relationships. Infoglide Identity Resolution can even find links between seemingly unrelated entities across several degrees of separation. For example:

The sequentially numbered cell phones between Person A and Person B could indicate a shared cell phone plan and a potential connection. The shared address between Person B and Person C indicates a relationship as well. Based on this, Person A may also know Person C. If  Person A is a prospective customer and Person C is a sanctioned entity, then this may warrant further investigation.

The Infoglide Federated Query Component enables organizations to access data from multiple disparate databases wherever they reside and can even use external publicly available data sources to fill in the gaps in an organization’s internal data. The Infoglide Federated Query Component has pre-built connectors to a variety of useful data including whitepages.com, LexisNexis and the OFAC list and can easily be pointed at additional data sources.