International Screening Solutions: Transforming Global Due Diligence Searches to Reduce Operational Costs

Eric Beach, CTO

While organizations traverse geographic boundaries to earn perfect business partnerships, customers, and employees, it is imperative to conduct rigorous, global background and due diligence checks that comply with the laws governing screening procedures and reduce operational costs. It is essential for businesses to know their customers and have highly functioning due diligence systems that verify information swiftly to optimize human and investment resources. Dealing with time-consuming verification of so-called “false positives” is an unfortunate challenge in an already challenged model. Legacy applications are not proficient in delivering real-time and ‘fresh’ data for instant verification. At this pivotal gap in the market, International Screening Solutions (ISS)—a trusted name in global screening—addresses the predicament with its WorldWatch Plus solution that fortifies global screening and due diligence programs. ISS focuses on local data sources and search processes, and constantly refreshes data to reduce verification costs and enhance due diligence reports.

Functioning as an outsourced international search operation, ISS’ methodology is simple and innovative: minimize the costs associated with false positives by making that data fresh, easy to verify, and easy to call through APIs. “Identity software and questionnaires help businesses find the basic ‘Who’ details of an individual. With WorldWatch Plus, we empower the businesses to understand the ‘What’ of that individual with deep research based on constantly updated data,” says Eric Beach, CTO. The company’s “self-serve” solution, featuring automated continuous monitoring, processes data by constantly refreshing and feeding it into the due diligence system in near real-time. The solution provides context and links back to each data source within the search results for instant verification.

Powered by artificial intelligence tools of machine learning and natural language processing, the API-based or SaaS solution processes the search results and sorts them categorically and by name variations for the benefit of the investigators. It isolates name variation and matches it with the search subject by assessing the updated data. This process makes the searches easy to verify and minimizes false positives.

ISS offers a variety of data from more than 1700 publicly available sources on financial enforcements, medical sanctions, professional debarments, money laundering, bribery violations and terrorism. Additionally, the company’s solutions search millions of negative media stories for other risk data, and return results within a single response. The risk search can be combined with Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) data, also made available through the WorldWatch Plus platform.

What places ISS in a unique position within the industry is unparalleled capability of constantly returning fresh data. Beach explains that processing database records of millions of individuals and businesses can be quite extensive in terms of eliminating or minimizing bad data and notifying the clients of changes. The challenge intensifies in monitoring large batch file transactions. ISS manages this challenge by incorporating every search result into a workflow process tool that audits historical records. It gives individuals the ability to adjudicate results and to enter adjudication notes for extended due diligence from within the platform. Offering an insight into ISS’s solution, Beach states that clients across the globe flag processing time as a key screening problem; clients using WorldWatch Plus reduced simple due diligence processing to three minutes and extended due diligence to less than 45 minutes.

“We source data from 247 countries and dozens of languages as part of our data consolidation process daily. We use machine learning and natural language processing to gather the most relevant and logical data, and we utilize a sophisticated hybrid cloud architecture to consolidate and normalize different types of data sources into a platform that supports big data analytics,” says Beach.

As ISS continues to stay at the front of the curve with its distinctive approach to KYC, the core vision stays unadulterated, pushing the envelope of advanced analytics solution to reduce false positives in the dynamic international search market.