Solution Brief
Real-Time Watchlist Screening
Confidently maintain compliance and adapt to a changing regulatory landscape
The issue
Watchlist and sanctions screening is critical for financial institutions (FIs) to maintain compliance with stringent regulatory requirements in an ever-changing market. To keep pace with constant market changes, regulators and supervisory bodies have evolved their requirements and expectations, requiring FIs to stay updated in real time to avoid penalties and breaches of compliance. With many FIs in this globally connected financial ecosystem operating across multiple countries and jurisdictions, navigating different – and, at times, conflicting – regulatory requirements makes ensuring compliance globally an increasing operational burden.
Simultaneously, customers are experiencing delays in both onboarding and transaction processing due to high numbers of false positives by their FIs’ service provider’s screening solution. In regions with strict privacy regulations, there is a fine balance between maintaining privacy standards and ensuring compliance – a concern that many customers have regarding both how their data is used and whether it is securely stored. For many customers, the entire watchlist and screening process is vague, opaque and ill-defined, leading to a lack of trust between FIs and customers, especially when transactions are improperly blocked or delayed.
The challenge
Complexity of sanction lists and a fast regulatory pace
Sanction lists are issued by various national and international jurisdictions. Regulatory bodies update these lists, sometimes daily. This fast regulatory pace, paired with the complexity of various naming conventions and transliterations requires a robust system and trustworthy resources. SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening provides seamless integration with commercial watchlists utilizing algorithms with holistic and semantic matching.
High alert rates, overloaded resource requirements and growing operational costs
High transaction volumes paired with high false positive rates are resource-intensive and time-consuming. These false positives require manual review, shooting up operational costs while contributing to customers’ lack of trust from improperly blocked transactions. SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening uses advanced fuzzy matching algorithms tailored to your business needs to ensure accurate matching, reducing the operational burden of reviewing false positives.
Lack of transparency and trust between customers and their FIs
Balancing privacy while ensuring compliance with ever-changing regulations, being transparent with customers about how their data is used and maintaining trust despite false positives is a constant burden for financial institutions. SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening provides fully explainable glass box models and four-eyes review to reduce errors, adhere to regulatory frameworks, maintain a clear audit trail and increase trust with customers.
Our approach
In this fast-changing environment, FIs that strategically adopt a next-generation watchlist and sanctions screening solution can quickly, effectively and confidently address escalating compliance, customer onboarding and risk threats.
We approach the problem by providing software and services to help you:
Bring together AI-driven matching algorithms with real-time decisioning
Our AI-driven, holistic matching algorithms, composite scoring and parameter tuning allow you to assign composite scores while tuning parameters via customizable presets to meet your organization’s needs – in real time.
Configure, flexible data orchestration and enrichment
Our extendable, flexible message specification allows for mapping of any data into the inbound data schema featuring an external messaging API.
Author private deny and allow lists
Maintain confidentiality of sensitive information by creating ephemeral deny lists with zero footprint. Simultaneously enforce organizational policies by explicitly allowing access based on pre-defined criteria to streamline the screening process.
Utilize an end-to-end scalable, secure and accessible cloud-native platform
Our fully cloud-native architecture is wholly scalable to support business growth and capture fully auditable actions, and includes industry-standard encryption algorithms.
SAS difference
SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening on SAS® Viya® detects and manages watchlist screening in both batch and real time. By partnering with an industry-leading, third-party screening engine, we have seamlessly integrated to provide efficient, robust watchlist screening.
SAS can help by:
Accelerating the screening process while reducing operational costs
- The holistic matching approach matches all available data points in real-time, including names, places, dates and identifications using semantically relevant algorithms across different languages and alphabets in a single step, streamlining and accelerating the matching process by up to a factor of 100.
Reducing false positives with accurate matching techniques
- Advanced fuzzy matching algorithms tailored to account for common aliases, transliterations and misspellings ensure accurate matching, reducing the operational burden of reviewing false positives.
Customizing scoring mixes for specific data points
- Users can prioritize certain data points based on their reliability and relevance, fine-tuning the matching process to balance detection of true and false positives, improving the effectiveness of the screening process.
Offering as-a-service list management
- Comprehensive list management as-a-service easily integrates into customer platforms through standardized REST APIs, providing high-efficiency, low false positive rates and reduced workload for analysts.
Supporting confident, secure and transparent decisions
- SAS’ cloud-native architecture offers reliable, scalable and secure computing capacity to meet business needs, optimize cost management and confidently maintain compliance with changing regulations.
The extendable, flexible message specification allows for mapping any data into the inbound data schema structure, featuring an external messaging API for easy integration with triage, case management, decision fulfillment and reporting systems. It also manages requests and responses from a third-party screening engine on a single platform.