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.
Know Your Customer Checks & Customer Due Diligence
Knowing your customer (KYC) is the due diligence process that financial institutions, banks, and other regulated entities must perform to identify their customers and ascertain if there is risk in doing business with them.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and the USA PATRIOT Act in the United States, this process is intertwined with many businesses. US financial institutions are required to verify the identity of their customers, maintain records of verification, and compare customer names to sanction lists.
Today, KYC regulations have become important parts of many nations' Anti-Money Laundering (AML) legislation. Regulated entities must know exactly who their customer is, including anything that may make them at risk for criminal activity, and be able to provide documentation proving the process was adhered to.
Every KYC program needs all four.
A compliant KYC program isn't just a checklist. It's a continuous process covering every stage of the customer relationship.
Customer Identification & 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. 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 & Risk Assessment
Regulated entities must identify who their customer is in order to apply a risk assessment. Sentinel™ allows users to search through a wide range of data sources, including sanction and enforcement lists, based on customer data such as name, address, and date of birth.
The search results and confidence scores can then be 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 of or suspected of criminal activity, or associated with known criminals
- ✓Government sanctioned entities, entries on OFAC lists and others that cannot be engaged with under applicable sanctions
Sentinel™ also features smart fuzzy matching to allow for name misspellings, ambiguity, and use of different character sets. Learn more about Sentinel's name screening science →
Data
Data
Log
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 & Sanctioned Entities
Individuals and organizations on OFAC SDN, HMT, UN, EU Consolidated, and 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 requiring enhanced due diligence measures.
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 sector.
Customer Review & Acceptance
One of the biggest problems organizations face with KYC compliance is false positives. False positives occur when a customer's identity appears high-risk but may not be. Every result returned from a KYC screening must be reviewed, and high false positive rates make that process very expensive and time consuming.
With Sentinel™'s advanced filtering and name screening science, it has the lowest false positive rate in the market.
- ✓High-risk customers may not be rejected, but companies are now aware that further scrutiny is warranted
- ✓Some customers on sanction 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
It is essential that new customers are screened before they begin doing business with a company, but it is just as essential that customers continue to be re-screened as time passes. Businesses often develop a false sense of security when working with a long-term customer. This is not a viable substitute for KYC checks.
People, organizations, legislation, and situations are everchanging. A customer's risk rating may change over time.
- ✓Upload a list of customers and Sentinel™ screens it continuously
- ✓Any new results immediately trigger an alert to the user
- ✓Customer lists can be batch uploaded or entered individually
- ✓Constant monitoring made easy and simple
KYC Documentation
Regulated entities don't just need to do KYC checks, they also need documentation proving it. Auditors will request 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 involving more than $10,000
- ✓Sentinel™ allows users to enter annotations for every entity reviewed
- ✓In-depth reports with multiple filtering criteria
- ✓Comprehensive, un-editable tamper-proof audit logs
The risk of non-compliance
These regulations prevent criminal activity and terrorism. It is no longer in a company's best interest to assume their customers are legitimate. KYC checks must be completed or the cost can be outstanding.
Fines for non-compliance can range from thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. A money transmitter in London was recently fined £7.8 million for failing to adhere to regulations. HSBC agreed to pay a $336 million settlement to end a financial crime dispute in Belgium.
The cost of compliance may be high, but the cost of non-compliance is even higher. A KYC solution like Sentinel™ can greatly aid regulated entities by automating the process and enhancing workflows.
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.