Source: SAS
SAS, the leader in business intelligence, today announced enhancements to its anti-money laundering solution that will enable financial institutions to more quickly pinpoint high-risk persons and entities while taking appropriate actions to mitigate risks.
These enhancements are a result of an agreement and integration with World-Check, which identifies individuals and businesses from over 230 countries that are known to represent a money laundering, compliance or reputational risk.
Financial institutions that use the improved, integrated SAS(r) Anti-Money Laundering solution can automatically screen their customers against World-Check's database of known high-risk individuals and businesses. The World-Check database includes known money launderers, fraudsters, Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), terrorists, organised crime syndicates, shell financial institutions and their beneficial owners, sanctioned entities and a dozen other high-risk categories from over 230 countries and territories. The database is derived from over 140,000 public sources and is updated daily. World-Check tracks and creates profiles for such entities and gathers information on their relationship network - the people and companies that are reported to be associated with each entry in the database.
RBC Financial Group (RBC) is an early adopter of SAS' data matching capabilities combined with World-Check's data. The bank has automated the process of screening its customer names against the World-Check database. "At RBC, we are committed to ensuring compliance with our legal obligations under relevant anti-terrorism legislation, while respecting the privacy rights of our clients," said Karim Rajwani, enterprise designated anti-money laundering officer, RBC Financial Group. "To do this we have assembled a professional team to manage our screening processes and implemented best-in-class technological solutions to make our screening processes more efficient and to provide quality data to assist in that screening."
To facilitate the matching process, SAS uses the latest technology from DataFlux(r), a SAS subsidiary, to parse, cleanse and standardise customer data and the World-Check database. The customisable DataFlux(r) matching technology takes into account misspellings, nicknames, transpositions, language-sensitive derivation and other common errors and omissions that may thwart traditional matching techniques.
"This identification capability helps our anti-money laundering customers comply with certain regulatory requirements, such as the 'Enhanced Due Diligence' provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act," said Mark Moorman, vice president of SAS financial services practice. "The SAS Anti-Money Laundering enhancements are yet another example of SAS' commitment to our customers in addressing specific compliance needs."
Using the combined SAS and World-Check capabilities, financial institutions can filter against the database in its entirety, or they can harness several pre-built SAS matching scenarios on subsets of the World-Check database, including Financial Action Task Force list of Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories, terrorists, PEPs, and a general high-risk category.