Sibos 2018 Sydney - LexisNexis Risk Solutions has unveiled a raft of product initiatives that aims to assist the way banks and companies in other industries comply with global economic sanctions regulations and other financial crime risks.

Name screening, while necessary to adhere to global regulatory requirements and to protect enterprises from enforcement risk, is an area that has presented significant challenges in the form of labor-intensive human processes, steadily increasing costs and meager rates of accurate risk identification.

For decades, banks and other organizations have relied on screening names and entities against government sanctions and other lists. Companies can now also use digital identity information such as location, behavior and threat intelligence in combination with physical identity information, to better identify and understand the risks presented by a customer or prospect.

Daniel Wager, vice president, global financial crime compliance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, says: "Digital identity attributes present the greatest opportunity to more accurately and efficiently identify financial crime risk arising not from individuals named on government lists, but from the digital footprints that illicit financiers and other bad actors leave behind. In a global environment, where far more interactions with customers occur in the digital realm than face-to-face, names are only one of hundreds of attributes that can be analyzed to identify potential risk."

Illicit financiers, sanctions evaders, arms proliferators and human traffickers rarely use names that can be found on government watch lists or in adverse media. They fabricate, steal or obfuscate true names to avoid detection, and like fraudsters, they rarely limit themselves to one named account within an enterprise that they target.

The use of digital identity data and attributes has transformed the fraud prevention space, and the use of this data through innovative solutions to address economic sanctions and other financial crime risk has the potential to revolutionize the industry's approach to brand protection and compliance.

The LexisNexis Risk Solutions True Cost of AML Compliance study of China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore found that 33 per cent of anti-money laundering (AML) compliance costs are made up of watch list activities, including periodic screening, sanctions operations, and KYC processes.