Financial crime teams have long struggled with seamlessly integrating their internal watchlist data into their due diligence work. Data is captured from different sources, such as financial intelligence units, and is often held in disparate databases or unmanageable spreadsheets. And while banks wish to screen these lists as a single, unified source, they still expect them to be appropriately segregated. smartLISTS allows firms to manage and update their own existing internal watchlists and develop new proprietary watchlists, which can in turn be used to match against future and existing clients for KYC screening. 

“smartKYC’s software already derives precise KYC intelligence from public (open web),  professional (subscription) and private sources,” said Dermot Corrigan, CEO of smartKYC. “With  the addition of smartLISTS, banks can now feel confident that not only is their internal data being managed properly, with the appropriate level of security, partitioning and revision history,  but also that they are being screened consistently.” 

With smartLISTS, firms are able to manage or ingest their own lists of individuals or entities. 

Hugo Chamberlain, COO of smartKYC said: “Each bank is different in its approach to KYC  screening and although many will subscribe to the same paid KYC sources, internal lists by their very nature are unique to each bank. Having a user-friendly and structured way to manage all  the various internal lists is of the utmost importance.” 

Furthermore, internal lists can have more than one function; not just another watchlist of high-risk people and companies from a financial crime point of view, but it could be people and companies that are forbidden from a conflict-of-interest angle, a list which will be unique to each bank. 

For example, one bank may wish to screen all its employees against a smartLIST of its vendors and vice versa. Through smartKYC’s innovative network analysis of unstructured data on the web, it can find any mention of involvement with an employee and a specific vendor on that smartLIST. 

In another example, a wealth manager may take the same approach by screening its client base against a smartLIST of prospective clients to see if there are any existing relationships and, on the positive side, see if there is potential for introductions by their clients.