ISTwatch© Intelligence - OFAC Compliance Software

ISTwatch© uses the searching and matching intelligence of NameSearch® to achieve unparalleled accuracy and speed while overcoming variations due to misspellings, transcriptions, transpositions, acronyms, phonetics, sequence differences, nicknames and many other common errors found in data.

Foreign name transcriptions

Foreign names often have multiple English transcriptions, which may cause a lot of confusion in the data matching process. The same Middle Eastern name can be spelled in 5-10 different ways, based on 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. Depending on a transcription method, the name “Mohammed Al-Kadir” can be spelled as “Mohammad Alqadir”, “Muhamad Alkadr”, “M’hamed Al Qadr”, making it impossible for regular comparison routines to find all relevant matches.

Officials at the FBI, CIA and INS cited a list of problems that pose as obstacles for law enforcement. The top issues on the list are
• conflicting methods used by agencies for spelling the same name
• inadequate software searching and matching capabilities at many organizations

ISTwatch© was specifically developed to overcome variations due to foreign name transcriptions. Loaded with an expert rule-base system and a set of specialized services, it handles a majority of such difficult cases, such as the ones below.

Spelling and keyboard errors also account for many variations in a typical database. Through the use of intelligent key building and advanced comparison routines ISTwatch© successfully overcomes spelling errors including: multiple typos, letter transpositions, missing or incomplete words etc. It will locate even badly misspelled names, as the following examples demonstrate.

Noise and extraneous information

In many cases, names and addresses require extensive cleansing prior to being submitted for matching. ISTwatch® software suite comes loaded with a set of specialized sanitization routines that will eliminate any noise words or extraneous information that may be present in the input

Below are some of the examples of how ISTwatch® tackles difficult searching and matching problems.

Acronym recognition

The ISTwatch© software is shipped with corporate search algorithms and acronym recognition functionality, which allow to significantly advance the ability to seek and match corporate name data. People readily understand the similarities between "Triple A towing" and "AAA towing" yet computerized systems would need to employ a knowledge based algorithm to recognize the relationship between Triple A and AAA. Here are the examples of valid matches retrieved by the ISTwatch© engine.