With regulatory compliance requirements and possible sanctions enforcement, it is no wonder organizations are paying more attention to who they are doing business with. In Canada, the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA) is charged with implementing specific measures to detect and deter money laundering and the financing of terrorist activities and to facilitate the investigation and prosecution of money laundering offences and terrorist activity financing offences. In the United States, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other threats to the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.

Name screening against Corporate Registries/Sanctions Lists and Politically Exposed Person (PEP) lists is necessary to maintain regulatory compliance with anti-money laundering (AML)/Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations. There are a number of data aggregators that provide watch-list databases to allow organizations to ensure that they are not doing business with a person or organization may be somehow compromised. Subscriptions to sanction lists allow both business and government to include a search against the list during an on-boarding workflow as part of the company’s due diligence. This can be a local search against a local copy of the sanction name file or can be part of a real-time query API call to a service.

The problem with sanction list name screening is twofold; the number of false positives and the inability to effectively resolve (or relate) against a complete entity through entity resolution. The first is simply a function of how to compare and score names. In an earlier blog, we emphasized how difficult it is to do name matching as global commerce, multiculturalism and migration increase the complexity in simple name matching. The second is related to how you resolve identities in your data as part of the process so that more information can be used in determining high quality matches against a sanction list.

IMT Name:ID™ offers enhanced due diligence allowing you to comply with domestic and international Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Counter Terrorist Finance (CTF), and sanctions enforcement regulations.

What is Name:ID?

IMT Name:ID is a list screening solution that leverages the best name scoring and searching technology (used by the US Government as the gold standard) that ensures a great reduction in false negatives as well as a highly configurable filtering and alerting component that ensures fewer false positives.

What is the value Name:ID brings – what does it solve?

Name:ID delivers highly accurate list screening that leverages all of the available incoming data, as well as some ‘derived’ attribution, which improves scoring fidelity based on the watch list content available to the solution.  Name:ID can be leveraged across any business unit that needs to have list screening capabilities.   Multiple lists can be combined, or checked separately.   ‘List Specific’ alerts can also be generated to allow for appropriately route generated alerts if needed.

Is Name:ID limited to name only?

The design of Name:ID takes into account that a critical success factor in any list screening solution is its ability to handle name only content. That is mostly because of the fact that watch lists typically have good names, but all other attributes are sparsely populated, or the validity of that data is not relevant to the current mission. Name:ID goes beyond name only and leverages all the incoming and derived attributes to adjust match scores accordingly.  Thereby allowing customers to more easily tune in false negatives and tune out false positives.

What is the underlying technology of Name:ID?

The underlying technologies within Name:ID include IBM’s world class Global Name Management layer and an identity resolution and non-obvious relationship solution. Together, these technologies represent an integrated solution that can monitor your transactional data to identify suspicious behavior and alert. Name:ID helps organisations manage situations of non-compliance and develop a sustainable and cost-effective solution for ongoing compliance.