NICE Actimize, a NICE business (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that FACEPOINT, which launched an industry-leading biometric risk screening engine, has joined the X-Sight Marketplace, bringing its cutting-edge facial recognition technology for advanced KYC and watch list risk screening to the ecosystem. NICE Actimize’s X-Sight Marketplace, which has grown to include more than 60 technology partners, is the first financial crime and compliance ecosystem that connects financial services organizations with data, applications, tools and service providers, providing both the value of choice and the ability to reduce integration timelines. 

Until recently, financial services organizations relied on alphanumeric matching to screen their customers against watchlists to fulfill their Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering / Counter Terrorism Financing (AML-CTF) regulatory obligations. Common names, transliteration issues, missing secondary identifiers, identity theft and impersonation contributed disproportionately to the high number of alerts, making it difficult not to miss true positives without a corresponding snowballing of false positives. 

FACEPOINT complements and enhances NICE Actimize’s AML screening and KYC solutions by offering an alternative to traditional name-based screening. FACEPOINT uses facial recognition to disambiguate potential matches, reduce false positive rates and identify emerging threats such as those posed by unnamed persons of interest that are not covered by watchlists. In the context of KYC screening processes, FACEPOINT’s “picture intelligence” maintains a worldwide image database of "people of interest", and offers a real-time risk mitigation solution thanks to cutting-edge image analysis. Biometric identification offers greater precision, accuracy and speed and therefore enormous potential for improved operational efficiency and reduction in compliance costs. 

“Financial crime evolves continuously. Financial institutions must face numerous sophisticated  challenges with targeted applications that solve these problems efficiently and effectively,” said Craig Costigan, CEO, NICE Actimize. “The X-Sight Marketplace offers dozens of highly specialized capabilities which support best-in-class financial crime, risk and compliance management and which, in the case of FACEPOINT, complement our integrated AML solutions suite with enhancements to our AML and KYC risk screening capabilities.” 

“FACEPOINT has truly disrupted the industry’s risk screening operations with its picture intelligence capabilities designed to enhance risk screening tools, understanding that identifying high-risk individuals is a growing challenge for financial institutions,” said Damien Martinez, CEO and Co-Founder, FACEPOINT. “Our unique biometrics risk engine is an ideal fit with NICE Actimize’s suite of anti-money laundering solutions, providing additional advanced capabilities to its robust lineup.” 

The NICE Actimize Integrated AML solution suite uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as its domain expertise and robotic process automation, to provide complete customer lifecycle risk coverage – from onboarding to ongoing CDD, EDD and transaction monitoring processes. Intelligent automation, AI and machine learning are combined with KYC-AML domain expertise to continuously assess risk and provide a holistic view of the customer across all business lines and products. 

NICE Actimize’s X-Sight Marketplace partner offerings address such categories as customer and counterparty intelligence, data management, device and channel intelligence, identity verification, screening and adverse media, user authentication and fraud, CDD/KYC, transaction monitoring, and alert and case management.  

For more information on the X-Sight Marketplace, please click here.