KYC screening that actually works.
Sentinel™ gives regulated organizations the tools to identify customers, assess risk, screen against global watchlists, and document every decision, all in one platform. Compliant from day one. Built for the long term.
What is KYC? Know Your Customer checks and customer due diligence
Know Your Customer (KYC) is the due diligence process that financial institutions, banks, and other regulated entities must perform to identify their customers and determine whether there is risk in doing business with them.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and the USA PATRIOT Act, US financial institutions are required to verify the identity of their customers, maintain records of that verification, and compare customer names against sanctions lists.
KYC regulations are now a core part of many nations' Anti-Money Laundering (AML) legislation. Regulated entities must know exactly who their customer is, including anything that may put them at risk for criminal activity, and be able to provide documentation proving the process was followed.
Every KYC program needs all four.
A compliant KYC program isn't a one-time checklist. It's a continuous process covering every stage of the customer relationship.
Customer identification and risk assessment
Identify who your customer is and apply a risk assessment to determine the likelihood of criminal activity.
Customer acceptance
Review risk results and make a decision: accept, escalate for enhanced due diligence, or decline.
Ongoing monitoring
Re-screen customers continuously over time. Risk profiles change, so compliance can't be a one-time event.
Documentation
Maintain tamper-proof audit trails, SAR/CTR filings, and annotations for every compliance decision made.
Customer identification and risk assessment
Regulated entities must identify who their customer is in order to apply a risk assessment. Sentinel™ lets users search a wide range of data sources, including sanctions and enforcement lists, using customer data such as name, address, and date of birth.
The search results and confidence scores are then used to establish whether an applicant is a high-risk individual or entity. High-risk customers can include:
- Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs): those at high risk of bribery or corruption
- Criminals: those accused or suspected of criminal activity, or associated with known criminals
- Government-sanctioned entities: entries on OFAC and other lists that cannot be engaged with under applicable sanctions
Sentinel™ also uses smart fuzzy matching to account for misspellings, ambiguity, and different character sets. Learn more about Sentinel's name screening science
Match / no match
Know who you're looking for before you screen.
Sentinel™ screens against all major risk categories automatically, so your team focuses on decisions, not data entry.
Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs)
Current and former government officials, their family members, and close associates who are at elevated risk of bribery and corruption.
OFAC and sanctioned entities
Individuals and organizations on OFAC SDN, HMT, UN, EU Consolidated, and 2,100+ additional sanctions and enforcement lists.
Adverse media
Customers linked to negative news coverage involving financial crime, fraud, corruption, money laundering, or terrorism financing.
High-risk jurisdictions
Customers operating in FATF-identified high-risk or non-cooperative jurisdictions that require enhanced due diligence.
Complex ownership structures
Entities with opaque beneficial ownership, shell companies, or structures that obscure the ultimate controlling party.
Unusual transaction patterns
Customers whose transaction behavior deviates significantly from expected norms for their profile or industry.
Customer review and acceptance
One of the biggest problems with KYC compliance is false positives: a customer looks high-risk but isn't. Every result returned from a KYC screen has to be reviewed, and high false positive rates make that process expensive and slow.
With its filtering and name screening science, Sentinel™ has the lowest false positive rate in the market.
- High-risk customers aren't always rejected, but you'll know when further scrutiny is warranted
- Some customers on sanctions lists cannot be engaged with at all
- Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) reports available for high-risk customers, including location confirmation and reputation verification worldwide
Ongoing monitoring
New customers need to be screened before they start doing business with you, and they need to keep being re-screened over time. A long-term relationship can create a false sense of security, but it's no substitute for KYC checks.
People, organizations, legislation, and circumstances change. A customer's risk rating can change with them.
- Upload a list of customers and Sentinel™ screens it continuously
- Any new result immediately triggers an alert
- Customer lists can be batch uploaded or entered individually
KYC documentation
Regulated entities don't just need to run KYC checks, they need documentation proving it. Auditors will ask for proof of due diligence, including the reasoning behind every decision. If a high-risk customer was accepted, why?
- Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs): filed with FinCEN when there is suspicion of money laundering or fraud
- Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs): filed with FinCEN for transactions over $10,000
- Annotations on every entity reviewed
- In-depth reports with multiple filtering criteria
- Tamper-proof audit logs that can't be edited
The risk of non-compliance
These regulations exist to prevent financial crime and terrorism. Assuming your customers are legitimate is no longer a safe bet. KYC checks have to be done, or the cost can be enormous.
Fines for non-compliance range from thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. A London money transmitter was fined £7.8 million for failing to follow regulations, and HSBC agreed to a $336 million settlement to end a financial crime dispute in Belgium.
Compliance has a cost, but non-compliance costs more. Sentinel™ helps regulated entities automate the process and keep their workflows moving.
KYC compliance that's built to last.
Truth Technologies has been helping regulated organizations meet their KYC and AML obligations since 1996, before most compliance departments existed. See what Sentinel™ can do for yours.