For a small, family-owned U.S. community bank that's been in business for 150 years, the commitment to serving the financial needs of local individuals and businesses remains unchanged; yet the risk and fraud landscape is evolving rapidly. With the number and types of scams proliferating and stringent regulatory requirements to protect customers and prevent financial crime, the bank relies heavily on Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions to provide vital intelligence — quickly. As it carries out due diligence on customers and investigates suspicious activity, CLEAR from Thomson Reuters — which provides comprehensive, up-to-date information from public records, sanctions databases, and media coverage — enables the bank to mitigate risk in an efficient yet effective manner.
Addressing the challenges
Knowing customers and identifying whether they pose a fraud risk is a challenging task — especially when scams are so prevalent and fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated. Conducting due diligence quickly, thoroughly, and with confidence in the information’s accuracy and relevance is critical.
According to a Senior BSA Analyst at the bank, “Whenever we're doing our enhanced due diligence (EDD) or Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) investigations, we bring in Thomson Reuters CLEAR solutions to find out: who are we banking and what is in their history that we need to know? We need to find out exactly who we're dealing with, and we use those results to draw conclusions from our investigations.”
“If something has triggered a concern over suspicious activity, for example because someone is making a lot of cash deposits and we don't know where the money's coming from, we're going to start digging around and use CLEAR to help us figure out who is this customer. Do they have a criminal history? Who do they do work for? What's their occupation? Do they have any property or entities linked to them? Who are their known associates? Have they been penalized or sanctioned or been in prison for theft, money laundering or racketeering? CLEAR gives us that intel about the customer that can help us put all the puzzle pieces together and decide whether to retain or exit the relationship.”
Why Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions?
The bank leverages Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions to assist its account opening, loan provision, and investigations teams to carry out identity checks on customers and identify whether they pose a fraud risk. When it comes to investigations, CLEAR is used at many different levels, from the mandatory EDD process and for BSA cases, to making suspicious activity reports (SARS) or sharing information with other financial institutions under Section 314B of the USA Patriot Act. CLEAR helps investigators ensure their investigations are rigorous — and therefore that their subsequent recommendations are robust — and enables the bank to demonstrate compliance with the relevant regulations.
Prior to deploying Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions, the bank was using another investigations product on the market, supplemented by Google searches. As well as being more cost-effective than the previous solution — and significantly more targeted and on-point — CLEAR also offers a much richer range of features and functionality. Another plus is that Thomson Reuters continuously upgrades and updates its solutions to keep customers at the forefront of technology and empower them to handle fast-changing threats. The bank’s investigators find Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions user-friendly and easy to tailor to their unique needs.
Future-proof solutions “Running a CLEAR report is embedded in our internal procedures now,” says the analyst. “These are things we must do at the BSA or EDD level, and they’re not going to go away. So, we're going to continue to use it, and whenever we get audited by regulators, they're going to be looking at this. CLEAR is going to be an integral part of our future for quite some time.” “The fact that Thomson Reuters is constantly updating and improving its Risk & Fraud Solutions is very important, especially in this industry, because when it comes to fraud, the criminals are often way ahead of us. CLEAR helps us keep up with the scammers. I wouldn’t want to work without it.” |
A rich range of features and functionality
Investigators at the bank called out several key features and functionality that are most valuable including:
Deep dives and Quick Analysis Flags
The reports generated by CLEAR are extensive, providing a deep dive across several categories of information. However, they also make key details immediately visible with Quick Analysis Flags. So, investigators can get a yes or no answer to a question such as whether a person has a criminal record, and they can then go to that section of the report and read more about it.
Analyzing risk
One favorite feature is the Risk Analysis Summary report. This pulls in data from a variety of sources and uses GenAI to provide a short risk profile summary describing what a particular business customer does, where the company is located, how long they have been in business, and if they appear on any sanctions or watch lists.
The analyst explains, “The CLEAR software gathers data from so many sources, and it gives it to me in a matter of seconds. Without it, it takes me maybe about an hour to do that risk analysis on my own. So, the Risk Analysis Summary is one of those features that I absolutely love, because it's a time saver. It’s accurate, and it targets my objective to mitigate risk because it basically tells me what the risk is with a business.”
Uncovering criminal history
Features that allow investigators to trace someone’s criminal history are also very useful. In one instance, an analyst was able to identify that a senior staff member at a customer’s business had been convicted of a lottery scam by cross-reference details of the business and its key personnel through CLEAR.
Clarifying property ownership
Given how common it is for criminals to launder money through property, as well as via shell companies or vehicles, the ability to provide an individual’s property ownership history is another well-used aspect of CLEAR.
“One of my colleagues relies on it for finding out about property ownership. We would have customers doing transactions who say, ‘Hey, you know what, I got all this money from selling my house.’ And we can cross reference it in CLEAR to verify if that's true, based on their property ownership history,” the analyst adds.
Identifying MSBs
A further timesaving, compliance-enhancing feature is that CLEAR reports indicate if a customer is a registered money service business (MSB). “If our customer is an MSB, we have to know about it and conduct a profile on that customer. If we didn’t already have that information, Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions let us know, and then we can properly tag that customer as an MSB,” he says.
Conducting accurate investigations – faster
One of the biggest benefits of CLEAR is the time it saves the bank’s investigators. “Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions help me finish investigations faster — but to a high quality,” says the analyst.
“Our bank is heavily targeted for fraud — romance scams, lottery scams, elder abuse — they’re all increasing. That means our team’s workload is going up, but our staff numbers stay the same. So, when I'm looking to save time, CLEAR saves me hours per case. I've never been late on a case, and I think that’s because of CLEAR: it just spits the data right out.”
“As those caseloads keep increasing, we’re basically fighting an uphill battle, and what’s helping us continue to fight that battle is Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions.”
