Here’s a quick update on the latest news from our product team.

If you have any questions on these updates, speak to your customer success manager or email us at support@complyadvantage.com, and we’ll get back to you soon.

TMS Case Management

Alert Queue: Entity 

Remediate your alerts quicker than ever before and manage your entity risk more effectively via our new Entity Alert Queue.

Key new features include:

• Sort, filter on, and prioritize your list of entities based on your bespoke needs 
• Easily assign, update, comment, and export your alerts in bulk
• Reduce time spent looking for entities or alerts with an optimized search function
• Customize the columns by selecting from a list of relevant fields important to you
• Find a complete audit log for an entity by clicking on it and going to the Comments & Activities section 

Get in touch with your Customer Success Manager to find out more.

CSOM

Move to use React Components

We are excited to finally announce the use of React components in the CSOM UI. This update slightly changes the look and feel of the platform, with some minor improvements that will enhance the user experience.

• Consolidation of the Internal List tab and the ComplyAdvantage Database tab, making it easier to access all the information you need in one place
• Pills have been added to case management filters, allowing you to quickly see which filters are applied to your search results
• Adverse Media links will now change color once selected. This will make it easier for users to keep track of the links they have already clicked on

The post Latest Product News — April 2023 appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

Here’s a quick update on the latest news from our product team.

If you have any questions on these updates, speak to your customer success manager or email us at support@complyadvantage.com, and we’ll get back to you soon.

Significantly improved transaction monitoring alert prioritization

With Smart Alerts, customers can say goodbye to alert fatigue. A model trained on customer-specific data and analyst feedback will identify patterns in alerts and assign a high, medium, low, or lowest risk score. It will also highlight key risk factors related to the alert and transactions that will help analysts resolve alerts faster. Prioritized alert management ensures analysts can manage backlogs efficiently. Results so far indicate that prioritization can increase analyst efficiency by 15-30%. 

KYB clients can now screen companies in 34 countries

To date, Know Your Business (KYB) only covered companies in the UK. We’ve now greatly increased our coverage to 34 countries, including nine of the most commercially important jurisdictions: the UK, the US, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Singapore, and the Netherlands. So you can efficiently run KYB process on companies across the globe. 

Self-serve editor enables customized alert content

Showing analysts customized alert content helps them to understand potential issues more quickly than they’re able to with generic risk scenario descriptions. 

Until now, this information could be programmed by us to include specific variables relevant to the scenario, such as ‘transaction amount’ or ‘count of transactions in a specific period’.

With the new editor, customers can customize such content by including any data fields using ‘@’ mentions and previewing changes, making this task a simple no-code interaction. 

The post Latest Product News — January 2023 appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

For example, a recent report by ComplyAdvantage and the FinTech FinCrime Exchange found soaring levels of concern about smurfing and money muling. Yet asked if they felt confident in their firms’ ability to identify and mitigate attempts at smurfing, 77% answered only ‘Yes – for the most part’. This suggests there are potential gaps and weaknesses in current approaches, including transaction monitoring rules. 

As a baseline, the report highlighted the three foundational categories of an effective transaction monitoring system:

1. Value: The overall value of funds transferred over a specific time period 
2. Volume: The overall number of transactions in a given time period 
3. Velocity: Rules designed to identify rapid movement of funds, typically over a shorter period of time than volume focussed rules

But with typologies changing rapidly and many firms – especially FinTechs – faced with large volumes of customer data to structure and process, how can compliance teams achieve the dynamic risk scoring they need to stay ahead of emerging risks?

Developing effective rules can also be difficult and labor-intensive. In some instances, firms may have to rely on template-based rules built by their vendor, which are highly restrictive and risk generating higher volumes of alerts. 

That’s why ComplyAdvantage offers a self-serve rules builder platform for its customers. This means compliance teams are able to create their own efficient and complex rules without writing any code. They can also test them in a sandbox before deployment, following a robust approval process. Defined roles and permissions for rule editors and approvers are included. 

Customers also have access to an in-house team of rule specialists who work on the construction and optimization of rules for businesses across the financial services industry. They bring their expertise on variations in a dynamic range of typologies to their work. Such experience can compliment internal rule building teams, delivering an effective ongoing partnership. Where firms don’t yet have rule building expertise in-house, support from ComplyAdvantage can serve as a valuable alternative. 

In addition, customers can search and add specific risk-related rules from a categorized library aligned to AML/CFT industry risk typologies. 

The benefits of this approach for compliance analysts include:

• View rules by status – Analysts can now see and understand their live rules, and how these have been applied across different segments using a risk-based approach 

• Edit existing rules – The autonomy to respond quickly to specific scenarios and continually improve their systems

• Flexible risk thresholds – Focus only on genuinely suspicious activity by setting different alert thresholds and treatments across a range of risk-based segments
• Fill coverage gaps – Meet evolving business needs without the need to design a new rule logic, and build custom rules where standard rule libraries don’t address a specific risk

Success story: Multipass

Multipass, a multi-currency business account designed for managing international bank transfers, has improved its compliance processes through using ComplyAdvantage’s rules builder. 

“The ability to see the details and conditions of each rule gives us a much better understanding of our performance,” said Anastasija Marusjaka, Senior Compliance Analyst. She added that “we can do this independently and understand the reason why alerts trigger, and how we can improve our system.”

“The best thing about ComplyAdvantage’s rules builder is that there is the ability to use previous data and create new rules. This helps me understand our rules and improve them. Day by day, we get better.”

Request a Demo

Discuss how the ComplyAdvantage self-serve rules builder can help meet your team’s transaction monitoring solution requirements

Request a Demo Today

The post Assess customer risks dynamically with self-serve rules builder for transaction monitoring appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

Since those lists change constantly, ensuring screening processes stay up to date and effective, and avoid inefficiencies and false positives, is an ongoing issue for obligated firms. The biggest challenge in this area consists of large volumes of transactions and critical time pressures.

To improve the accuracy of your screening program while minimizing false positives, ComplyAdvantage offers the ability to screen the SWIFT / Bank Identification Code (BIC) of a bank instead of its name.

Bank Identification Code (BIC)?

BICs are unique bank identifiers, and some sanction lists include sanctioned BICs. According to SWIFT, the 7,000 banks that use the SWIFT network for correspondent banking have more than 1 million individual correspondent relationships. Screening the BIC code instead of the entity name therefore significantly improves false-positive rates on correspondent bank screening. 

BICs are sometimes mentioned in sanctions lists – when this happens, ComplyAdvantage adds them to its database. The database is enriched by the addition of missing BICs through manual updates made by the ComplyAdvantage sanctions team. 

Why is this important to my business?

1. Screen counterparty banks as part of your compliance program.
2. Improve screening accuracy without increasing false positives.
3. Keep pace with ever-evolving financial crime activity.

ComplyAdvantage Transaction Screening

• Screen the whole transaction against real-time Sanctions and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) coverage via a single API call
• Identify sanctions risk in all parts of the payment message including unstructured free reference text.
• Select sanction lists, fuzziness levels, or the most commonly configured algorithms, on a rule-by-rule basis, to configure a risk-based approach in a more granular way.
• Aggregated transaction-level alerts, MI reporting and an electronic audit trail.

If you would like to find out more about how ComplyAdvantage can drive efficiencies in your transaction risk management program, speak to a member of our team.

The post Product Update: BIC Screening appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

By enabling firms to effectively scrutinize their customers’ transactional behavior, transaction monitoring is the foundation of an effective anti-money laundering (AML) strategy.

This task has become more challenging with the introduction of virtual assets. In response to the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies over the last decade, new standards and regulations have been published by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Commission. These are designed to provide clarity on the status and legitimacy of crypto assets that are not covered by existing financial services legislation.

The compliance team of a virtual asset service provider (VASP) faces several challenges, all of which will require more time and effort to be spent on compliance measures. This will help avoid the fines and reputational damage that come with non-compliance: 

• Multiple solutions are needed to review different types of risks for crypto or fiat transactions.
• Data is spread across multiple systems, making it hard for analysts to construct an accurate picture and report any suspicious or illicit activity. 
• Different providers need to be integrated, which is a strain on time and resources.
• Teams must be educated on the different software programs and processes.

This is where ComplyAdvantage comes in. Partnering with blockchain analytics provider Elliptic, we are combining the two worlds of fiat and crypto risk assessment in one product to increase the speed of investigation. 

Utilizing Elliptic’s rich dataset to raise blockchain-specific alerts within the ComplyAdvantage platform, users will be able to consolidate their risk management process, deep dive into blockchain analysis, and reduce the amount of time and money spent on integration.

By adopting this approach, firms will be able to:

• Evaluate counterparties and detect suspicious behavior across fiat and cryptocurrencies in one platform.
• Avoid multiple integrations by sending both fiat and crypto transactions to one provider. Automatically link to Elliptic Navigator for further investigation when risk rules are triggered.
• Integrate data feeds, case management systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms for enhanced monitoring in one consolidated system.  

This is just the first step toward our vision of a single crypto and fiat risk management solution. If you would like to find out more about how ComplyAdvantage can drive efficiencies in your transaction risk management program, speak to a member of our team.

The post Product Update: Introducing Blockchain Analysis appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

Powered by an upgraded machine learning model, users can now further reduce false positives while improving the rate of true matches for more severe categories of adverse media. 

Below we explain what that means and explore the reasons for making this change; here it is in brief:

• Easier to justify categories to enhance decision making
• Aligned to the latest FATF and EU MLD recommendations
• An upgraded machine learning model to ensure surgically precise categorization
• More flexibility to configure screening against only relevant categories

Background

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations state that financial institutions must “understand their client’s reputation”, including previous criminal liabilities like involvement in money laundering investigations. Compliance with that direction requires adverse media screening – which traditionally involves time-consuming manual checks of vast, unsorted amounts of news reports, blog articles, and social media.

Categorizing adverse media, allows firms to prioritize that workload, and gauge the level of risk associated with each client more efficiently. Negative news categorization also better facilitates automated screening, in which searches can be further tailored to client profiles and regulatory environments.

This is particularly effective when using a profile-based adverse media tool which ensures that media is accurately grouped according to individuals and organizations, and enriched with identifiers like the year of birth and country. It allows efficient screening by quickly discounting irrelevant matches based on known customer information – which is in stark contrast to the frustrating experience of sifting through long lists of media with article-based solutions.

Blurred Lines

At ComplyAdvantage, we’re investing millions of dollars in training data to locate signals in the long tail of media where hidden risks actually exist. This is only possible through machine learning, not via outdated rules-based systems. 

Once adverse media is identified, the next step is to give customers the option to filter out what is not relevant to their business. However, when it comes to adverse media crime types, there are not always clearly defined borders. What constitutes an act of terrorism but not a violent crime, for example? 

The recent codification of 22 predicate offenses also changes the tone of the debate, because it places predicate criminality back at the forefront of what AML is about – the detection, disruption, and prevention of crimes that help criminals make money. 

To ensure good machine learning classification accuracy, an adequate number of well-labeled categories are required. Too many categories, or categories that are difficult to understand, would result in a higher probability of being misclassified (high false positives & false negatives). Too few categories and the result is correct classification but a high degree of non-relevant media (false positives). Therefore to ensure our customers benefited from as much flexibility and accuracy in their screening as possible, we needed to land on the most optimal compromise point.

Process

To refine our new categories, we spoke to hundreds of ComplyAdvantage customers and subject matter experts to really understand the issues they were facing and what regulated organizations would need to enhance the efficiency of their adverse media screening. 

We’ve grouped them as follows:

1. Property
2. Financial AML/CFT
3. Fraud-Linked
4. Narcotics AML/CFT
5. Violence AML/CFT
6. Terrorism
7. Cybercrime
8. General AML/CFT
9. Regulatory
10. Financial Difficulty
11. Violence NON AML/CFT
12. Other Financial
13. Other Serious
14. Other Minor

Depending on their jurisdiction or product line, users need to precisely search and only see customer profiles that contain categories relating to what is deemed as relevant to their business. 

All of our adverse media entity profiles are assigned at least one category depending on the type of media they have been associated with, and therefore existing profiles needed to be assigned to the new categories to align search settings and the underlying data.

Settings within our REST API are configurable, meaning customers can change thresholds, search strings, or any other relevant information as required. This gives compliance officers the ability to adapt their screening approach to regulatory changes and business strategy at a moment’s notice.

Result

1. True AML/CFT focused taxonomy aligned to regulatory guidance 
2. Machine learning contextual understanding
3. 40,000+ profile updates daily with only relevant monitoring alerts 
4. Categories designed to serve different risk appetites
5. Multiple possible configurations.

Want to learn more about how AIM Insight can help your business? Find out how Santander UK cut their customer onboarding cycle time from 12 days to 2 days.

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