ComplyAdvantage, a global leader in AI-driven financial crime risk data and detection technology, today announced that the company has added Know Your Business (KYB) data to create the industry’s first unified and most comprehensive data graph of individuals and business entities.  KYB is the process to verify the identity and understand the risk of a business customer either before or during their on-boarding to a service.

With the addition of KYB data, ComplyAdvantage now has a knowledge graph that includes over 400 million companies and related directors covering 200 + countries and territories that has been derived from over 20,000 active data sources. This puts the reg tech innovator in the unique position of having the only AI-enabled solution that can truly contextualize relationships between individuals and business entities to uncover hidden financial crime risks with the greatest of accuracy. 

“In the never-ending war on financial crime, AML and sanctions executives recognize the increasing imperative of enriched data to greater agility, effectiveness, and efficiency,” asserts Chuck Subrt, a senior analyst at Aite Group. “The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified the need for and reliance on superior data. Through elevated risk-relevant intelligence on individuals and businesses, organizations can build more holistic understandings of parties enabling them to optimize financial crime detection, investigation, and due diligence and achieve faster and more informed decision-making.”

According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, it’s estimated that each year governments lose at least $500 billion from profit-shifting enterprises; $7 trillion in private wealth hidden in haven countries, with 10% of world GDP held offshore; Money laundering of around $1.6 trillion per year, or 2.7% of global GDP. The opacity of beneficial ownership and business control has stymied global regulators and compliance teams alike in their abilities to find, mitigate or prevent financial crimes from happening. 

The reality is that the traditional methods of assessing beneficial ownership using siloed data sources and human analysts are no longer equipped to quickly uncover unforeseen financial crime risks associated with corporate structures obscured by shell companies and tax havens.   But now, by unifying risk datasets and linking information , ComplyAdvantage ComplyData™ offers global compliance teams a comprehensive hyperscale, AI-enabled solution that uncovers hidden threats and associated risks due to connections between suspect entities such as individuals and corporations.

“Our vision has always been to take on and neutralize the risk of money laundering and all other global financial crimes by building the first global, connected database of people and companies powering world-leading financial crime detection tools,” said Charles Delingpole, Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage.  “Now, with our new KYB data integration we are seeing this vision fulfilled, allowing us to expand our global reach, depth of coverage and the ability to significantly increase the accuracy of our real-time, risk-focused insights.” 

Already the preferred choice of some of the world’s largest banks, enterprises and high-growth fintechs, ComplyAdvantage uses machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organizations manage their risk obligations and prevent financial crime. The company’s proprietary database is derived from millions of data points that provide dynamic, real-time insights across sanctions, watchlists, politically exposed persons, and negative news. This reduces dependence on manual review processes and legacy databases by up to 80% and improves how companies screen and monitor clients and transactions.