Name Screening Challenges

Stricter regulatory compliance requirements and possible sanctions enforcement are driving more and more organizations to pay more attention to who they are doing business with. 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. Existing watchlist databases and services allow organizations to ensure that they are not doing business with a person or organization that may be somehow compromised. The problems with these subscription based sanction lists are twofold; one, the number of false positives where a person is incorrectly placed on a list causing hardship to this person, and two, the inability to effectively resolve (or relate) an identity to the list due to poor data and/or matching and resolution capabilities. 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.