Executive summary
Creative Solutions Software Corporation uses CLEAR, the leading Risk & Fraud solution from Thomson Reuters, to make informed decisions about onboarding new customers and underpin its Know Your Customer (KYC) policy. Part of Iris Global, the company offers managed payroll services to businesses and accountancy firms through its myPay Solutions service. It introduced CLEAR to facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements, but it has also seen significant benefits to its business and its clients in mitigating risk and minimizing losses.
The opportunity: Building a robust KYC program
As myPay Solutions is considered a money service business under U.S. law, regulators require Creative Solutions Software Corporation to have a KYC policy and review potential customers for criminal history or nefarious activity, such as appearing on sanctions lists, before onboarding them. Prior to deploying CLEAR — which provides comprehensive, up-to-date information from public records, sanctions databases, and media coverage — the six-strong compliance team was using free tools that could only make basic, cursory checks on customers. With a client base of 140,000 businesses — some of whom are direct customers and some who are clients of accountancy firm customers — they were encountering several different challenges.
Prior to being classified a money service business in 2015, they did not have a robust KYC program. Jennifer Hill, Compliance Manager, explains, “We were using a free product to take a quick look at prospective clients, but there wasn’t much you could find. It wasn’t fit for purpose. It would come up with a credit rating score, but it didn’t give much information about the business or the owner.” This resulted in the organization having an elevated fraud risk.
Using free solutions also meant that the compliance team often had to search the same subject multiple times on different platforms to find all the needed data. This process was very inefficient and manual.
The solution: Comprehensive, all-in-one coverage
Creative Solutions Software Corporation leverages CLEAR to verify critical business and ownership details—including addresses and social security numbers—regardless of the customer’s global location. In addition to screening for felonies and matches on the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) lists, CLEAR uniquely enables the company to uncover financial red flags such as liens, judgments, tax warrants, and bankruptcies. These insights, which no other solution they evaluated could provide, empower the company to assess risk more accurately and make informed decisions on customer applications. This capability helps mitigate potential financial losses for both Creative Solutions and its accountancy firm clients.
With CLEAR, Creative Software Solutions is well-equipped for audits. Its reports are time-stamped and easily saved, providing reliable documentation to meet regulatory compliance requirements. Hills says regulators “will pick maybe 10 clients that we've onboarded, and they'll say we want to see the onboarding report for these dates. So, it's nice because the report will give us a time stamp.”
Rooting out ID theft is now far more straightforward, thanks to the ability in CLEAR to determine if client telephone numbers are connected to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) rather than traditional telephone systems — which can be a red flag that requires further investigation. Moreover, 350,000 monthly customer monitoring scans are run seamlessly to highlight new concerns among the existing client base. When a potential problem is identified, CLEAR makes investigations easy. According to Hill, “It gives us the opportunity to dig deeper.”
“We chose to stay with CLEAR because no other solution offered everything we need all-inclusive in one place,” she adds. “We didn’t want to have one product to show us financial crimes and another to research liens and judgements and bankruptcies, and so on. Even though regulators aren’t concerned about liens and judgements or bankruptcies, it’s very helpful information for us. Knowing if somebody has that debt or that blot on their credit history means they might not be able to cover payroll, and we could end up getting burned.”
CLEAR consolidates the majority of the information Creative Software Solutions needs into a single search—eliminating the need for the compliance team to manually search across multiple platforms for the same subject. “When we started investigating other products on the market, nothing else out there was as clear-cut, in-depth, or as automatic in how it delivered information as CLEAR. CLEAR gives us a picture of our clients immediately, whereas a lot of the other competitor products weren’t giving us that” says Hill.
The outcome: Deterring fraudsters and increasing confidence in onboarding
Given the sums involved, payroll fraud or a company’s inability to pay out against its payroll obligations represents a major risk. CLEAR enables Hill and her team to confidently take on clients and stay ahead of potential risks — all while streamlining operations without additional headcount.
“CLEAR pulls data from all public databases. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to figure it out ourselves, and it would take forever. There’s no way we could find out about liens and judgements on Google — you must go to state government websites which aren’t easy to search,” says Hill.
Regulators are impressed by the company’s use of CLEAR, which reflects well on its thoroughness and saves times and money when it comes to state examinations or audits — which are charged for by the hour. “We don’t have to spend time telling them about the products we’re using because when we mention CLEAR and give them our KYC policy, they tend to say, ‘Oh, that’s perfect’ and move on.”
Accountancy firm clients also appreciate the company’s use of CLEAR, as it helps protect them from risk and enables them to bring on new payroll clients with confidence. This precaution has helped Creative Solutions Software Corporation attract and retain more business from accountants.
CLEAR connects with other important software the company uses, such as Salesforce, via application programming interfaces (APIs), allowing data to flow smoothly between applications. In Creative Solutions Software Corporation’s case, this turnkey interoperability eliminated the need to invest in a new standalone customer relationship management (CRM) solution, since CRM can be handled seamlessly through Salesforce.
Hill and her team are excited about the possibility of automating more basic checks in CLEAR, freeing them up to focus on more higher-value tasks that require specialist expertise, such conducting further, more in-depth checks. She knows she can rely on excellent customer support from Thomson Reuters as the journey with CLEAR continues. In her view, “The CLEAR support team is one of the best I've worked with.”
She concludes, “There’s not a day that goes by when we don’t use CLEAR — it’s open on my team’s computers from the time they begin until the end of the day. CLEAR is always where we start.”
Smart Decisions
By using CLEAR, Creative Solutions Software Corporation has identified multiple instances of potential fraud and flagged numerous companies it ultimately chose not to engage with—strengthening its due diligence and risk management processes.
For example, if a client’s email is hacked and contract employees are added to their account, CLEAR enables the company to determine if those employees are real people, or if the information is false, such as if the names or Social Security numbers don’t match.
In the first year of deployment, CLEAR flagged that an accounting firm had hired an administrative assistant recently released from jail for tax fraud. This flag promoted the company to not onboard the firm.
This is rare — but vital. Having reliable information from CLEAR keeps the proportion of customers denied payroll services to a minimum, because often it identifies issues that can be fixed. On average, the company refuses less than 1% of potential business. However, that small percentage can save large losses. As Hill points out, it’s not just about volume, but the damage fraudsters or financially weak customers can do.
“If a fraudster does get through, losses could be anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000. And if they get you once, they don't stop trying to get through again via any method they can. Having CLEAR has helped show we’re serious about combating fraud, so we don’t get targeted like we used to. They know we’ll block them from doing business with us. Even if fraudsters develop new tricks down the road, if we stick to our procedures and continue to run everybody through CLEAR, we should be able to stop them in their tracks,” says Hill.
