AML Screening & ComplianceThe USA PATRIOT ACT was adopted in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The ACT is intended to strengthen U.S. measures to prevent, detect, and prosecute international money laundering and the financing of terrorism. These efforts include anti-money laundering (AML) tools that impact the banking, financial, and investment communities. The ACT requires financial institutions to establish appropriate, and where necessary, enhanced due diligence policies, procedures, and controls that are reasonably designed to detect and report instances of money laundering through foreign private banking and correspondent accounts.
After the ACT was signed into law, IST was contacted by our country’s leading airlines to provide a terrorist search solution so that passenger manifests could be checked against lists of all known terrorists. The solution needed to perform specialized search services designed to process published terrorist search list data.The system had to be extremely intelligent to overcome the infinitely numerous techniques used to disguise real identities and needed to process quickly. Through the utilization of our advanced, multicultural fuzzy search and matching technology, a solution was developed that overcomes significant variations such as missing words, out-of-sequence errors, nicknames, abbreviations, phonetic variations, multi-national sources, concatenations and truncations while reducing the incident of false matches. Thus, our ISTwatch© product was developed.
ISTwatch was further developed to scan additional lists to provide solutions for the financial and investment communities. This enables systems to quickly screen individuals against OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list and other denied parties lists, such as FBI’s most wanted, Canada’s OSFI terrorist lists, Bank of England’s consolidated lists and Financial Action Task Force data on money laundering countries among others. Thus, a powerful tool was deployed to assist organizations in their compliance efforts.
A key feature of ISTwatch is its ability to map complex conventions used in non-Latin based names with characters in Latin-based alphabets as part of its powerful multicultural name transliteration feature. Non‐English names will often have multiple English transcriptions causing anomalies in the data matching process. It is possible that one name can be spelled five to ten different ways, based on the conventions used. These differences include vowel and diacritic representations, non‐standard word splitting and concatenation, use of glottal stops, double letters and consonants not present in Latin‐based alphabets.
The advantages of using ISTwatch as an AML screening or compliance tool can help your organization to:
After the ACT was signed into law, IST was contacted by our country’s leading airlines to provide a terrorist search solution so that passenger manifests could be checked against lists of all known terrorists. The solution needed to perform specialized search services designed to process published terrorist search list data.The system had to be extremely intelligent to overcome the infinitely numerous techniques used to disguise real identities and needed to process quickly. Through the utilization of our advanced, multicultural fuzzy search and matching technology, a solution was developed that overcomes significant variations such as missing words, out-of-sequence errors, nicknames, abbreviations, phonetic variations, multi-national sources, concatenations and truncations while reducing the incident of false matches. Thus, our ISTwatch© product was developed.
ISTwatch was further developed to scan additional lists to provide solutions for the financial and investment communities. This enables systems to quickly screen individuals against OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list and other denied parties lists, such as FBI’s most wanted, Canada’s OSFI terrorist lists, Bank of England’s consolidated lists and Financial Action Task Force data on money laundering countries among others. Thus, a powerful tool was deployed to assist organizations in their compliance efforts.
A key feature of ISTwatch is its ability to map complex conventions used in non-Latin based names with characters in Latin-based alphabets as part of its powerful multicultural name transliteration feature. Non‐English names will often have multiple English transcriptions causing anomalies in the data matching process. It is possible that one name can be spelled five to ten different ways, based on the conventions used. These differences include vowel and diacritic representations, non‐standard word splitting and concatenation, use of glottal stops, double letters and consonants not present in Latin‐based alphabets.
The advantages of using ISTwatch as an AML screening or compliance tool can help your organization to:
- Avoid Fines from Violations ‐ The fines for non‐compliance violations can be substantial. Depending on the program, criminal penalties can include fines ranging from $50,000 to $10,000,000 and imprisonment ranging from 10 to 30 years for willful violations. With the help of ISTwatch, suspicious transactions can be identified before it is too late.
- Reduce Risk –Identification of high risk and sanctioned individuals and entities known to represent a direct or potential risk. The best way to mitigate such risks is to regularly screen existing and new customers, vendors, employees and other business related entities against these high risk individuals and entities.
- Reduce the amount of false positives in screenings‐ Through our advanced search and matching technology, IST successfully created a system that overcomes many significant variations while reducing incidents of false positives. False positives are people and/or organizations that should not be
blocked but are flagged as potential blocked candidates. User controlled similarity thresholds and confidence levels allow complete flexibility in the matching process. Fuzzy or exact matching can be performed on other identifiers such as dates in different formats, addresses, passport numbers etc.
- Easily integrate the software - Intuitive APIs allows ISTwatch functionality to be integrated into enterprise systems, applications, and databases.
- Increase reliability ‐ IST’s advanced, fuzzy, multicultural searching and matching engine has evolved as the leading technology for advanced searching and matching. Integrated with other applications such as our flagship NameSearch product, it is actively used in time and accuracy critical applications and is used by many large organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies and federal government organizations.
- Easily integrate into most platforms ‐ ISTwatch runs on all versions of Windows®, UNIX®, and Linux® and on AS/400, IBM Mainframe systems. It delivers the same results across all platforms.
