Overview
What is Name Sanction Screening
Evelyn is an AI Agent for Name Sanctions and PEP Screening Alert Review providing support of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and compliance processes. The AI Agent is designed to identify sanctioned individuals, entities, and securities posing a potential risk or all relevant names during onboarding and throughout the customer relationship lifecycle.
Why Name Sanction Screening is important to customers
Financial institutions (FI) collect the identity of individuals and entities to meet their Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) standards. These individuals and entities include beneficial owners and their related or connected parties, such as guarantors, nominee shareholders, and directors.
In general, the AI Agent works with the two targets:
Sanctioned individuals and entities. If a target is on a sanction list, other people and institutions are prohibited from providing it with financial resources or performing commercial transactions. FIs don't want such people or entities to be their customers, be connected to them, or influence them. In case of an exact match for a sanctions alert, the target's account must be blocked.
Politically Exposed Persons (PEP). PEP is a current or former senior domestic or foreign political figure, immediate family, and close associates. FIs increase the person's risk rating or escalate it for review in case of a valid PEP alert.
How Name Sanction Screening is handled today
Banks use watchlists and screening software to identify politically exposed and sanctioned individuals and entities during the onboarding and periodic refresh processes.
Typically, FIs utilize a large number of domestic and international watchlists produced by the following organizations or governments: Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC), UN Security Council, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Her Majesty's (HM) Treasury (UK), FBI, European Union (EU), Department of State, Bureau of Industry and Security, and others.
The watchlists can include countries, persons, organizations, vessels, banks, and companies involved in sanctionable activities, such as terrorism, human rights abuses, cybercrimes, drug trafficking, the proliferation of mass destruction weapons, and so on.
Scanning watchlists and other sources can result in thousands of daily hits that bank employees must manually resolve to determine a customer's risk profile. Mistakes and failure to comply can lead to hefty penalties and misuse of bank services by untrustworthy clients.
Challenges faced with Name Screening Screening
- The majority of hits are false positives and must be resolved manually by bank employees.
- Manual effort causes delays and mistakes in KYC completion.
- Disposition of hits requires gathering information from multiple internal and external sources.
Benefits of Name Screening Alert Review
Workfusion's Name Screening Alert Review is intended to remove the above challenges and significantly reduce periodic manual reviews. It can complement your existing screening system and serve as an add-in or a standalone tool.
For whom this solution is designed: any entity that requires screening of names according to the law, for example, banks, insurance companies, and so on.
Purpose:
Provide a complete ready-to-use solution for Name Screening Alert Review if you don't have a specific screening tool.
The screening runs in the AI Agent's interface. Here, the human operator receives the summary and recommended actions on the screened individual or entity. Alternatively, they can manually review only those hits that are tagged as false positives.
Reduce and speed up the manual review of the results from the existing Sanction Screening system.
You may already have a screening solution that you do not intend to replace and want to reduce the number of false positive hits for manual review.
The flow is as follows:
The AI Agent fetches a hit from the FI's screening system (for example, LexisNexis Bridger, FircoSoft) and pulls in two sets of information:
- FI customer or related party name and identifying information available
- Watchlist individuals and identifying information available
Evelyn runs a set of rules comparing the collections of information to determine if the hit is false positive or true positive.
If the AI Agent cannot identify the hit on a false positive basis, it triggers the analyst's human-in-the-loop capability to review it.
Once the decision is made, the AI Agent feeds the result into the FI's screening system or record system.
To receive hits from external sanction screening systems other than OFAC, you need to purchase their licenses additionally.
Supported external screening systems
Integrated:
- Dow Jones Risk & Compliance
- Refinitiv World-Check
- Firco Trust Case Manager API
- Thomson Reuters CLEAR
Planned:
- OFAC
- RELX Group Accuity
Connectors:
Bridger XG connector for integration with the LexisNexis Bridger system
Thomson Reuters CLEAR API connectors to work with Thomson Reuters CLEAR as a data provider
Automation benefits
Evelyn determines if a hit on a customer's name is a match or a false positive using the bank's internal KYC data, including age, gender, and location, and external data sources, for example, government information portals. Automating the PEP and sanctions alert reviews helps drastically lower the number of false positives a person must review manually, thus reducing the time and manual effort required while increasing accuracy.
- 70% reduction of manual work
- 80% reduction in false positives
- Operational analytics captured throughout the process
- Robust and complete audit trail