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 burden, both financially and operationally given the lack of automation in the end-to-end sanction screening process.
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 slow, vague, opaque, ill-defined and hardly automated, 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. Multiple regulatory bodies across the globe update these lists several times a day. This fast regulatory pace, paired with the complexity of various formats, naming conventions and transliterations requires a robust system and trustworthy resources.
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 multiple manual reviews, shooting up operational costs. These highly educated resources are spending time and energy on obvious false positives instead of focusing faster on risky transactions.
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, maintaining trust despite false positives and avoiding delaying or blocking transactions in a world where customers expect real-time action is a constant burden for financial institutions.
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 financial 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. 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, including 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.
Configure, flexible data orchestration and enrichment
Our extendable, flexible message specification allows users to decide how they want to screen and orchestrates transaction flows with an external messaging API.
Automate list management and author private deny and allow lists
SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening provides seamless integration with commercial watchlists, sparing you the cost and effort of list monitoring, updates and validation. 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 regulatory strengthening, 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:
Providing customers with a unified fraud, AML and compliance solution
- SAS Real-Time Watchlist Screening’s holistic approach to compliance aligns with your cloud-focused information and communication technology strategy and enhances your operational efficiency across all AML risk, fraud and compliance domains.
Accelerating the screening process while reducing operational costs
- The holistic matching approach matches all available data points (names, places, dates) in real time, using semantically relevant algorithms across different languages and alphabets in a single step. This screening scalability and responsiveness to regulatory changes is at no cost with our cloud-based engine approach.
Reducing false positives with accurate matching techniques and screening policy configuration
- Compliance managers can customize their screening policies to different data sources or types of transaction and apply exceptions where needed.
Offering as-a-service list management
- Maintaining up-to-date watch lists is included. 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.