Readers who have been following my articles know that I have written financial crime articles for many years, including periods when I worked for two of the most prominent firms in the compliance industry, whose databases of high-risk individuals are among the most popular commercial resources for due diligence investigations, and which are routinely accessed at account opening by financial institutions, and other entities.
I have written thousands of articles, using solely open-source information, identifying individuals and companies involved in money laundering, Ponzi schemes, and the entire spectrum of financial crime. Often, among my readers, many of those who were also users of the high-risk databases and resources, would contact me. They wanted to know why the individuals and entities that I wrote about were not already profiled in the databases they subscribed to, or the information was not up-to-date; That is an eminently fair question, as the database clients are not being well served, due to the time lag between the appearance of negative information, and its appearance in the profile.
The answer of course is that databases that use the profile method to identify individuals and entities that are involved in crime or corruption come up short, because they focus on the targets, and not the targets' negative information. They can never extract all the relevant information, and post it to the profiles, on a real-time basis. To perform such a feat would require nearly an infinite number of researchers, working around the clock, without making any data entry errors. This is impossible, with the result that relevant negative information is not posted timely. Compliance officers require an early warning system not available through traditional profile-focused databases.
What is needed is a supplemental due diligence program that:
(1) Retrieves the negative news from all available sources, and all new watch list information, constantly, and makes it accessible on a real-time basis.
(2) Systematically stores processed inquiries, screens those names against the latest sources on a daily basis, and delivers them to the user, eliminating any follow-up queries on the user's part.
(3) Searches both the latest, as well as historical, sources of negative news and watch list information.
(4) Documents your results with an audit trail for regulatory.
(5) Allows you to bulk load existing clients, and to batch new inquiries.
(6) Provides customizable and scaleable searches.
I have been looking for such a resource for a long time, and I am pleased to report that I did find one that is available for compliance officers: Check For Risk. I have personally road-tested the data, entering the most difficult and obscure queries I could think of, and it provided information that I could not get elsewhere; It makes for a supplemental resource that fills a gap not covered by the databases that you are using in due diligence inquiries. Check it it out yourself here. http://www.checkforrisk.com, and then access the special page for a discount on the subscriber price exclusive for readers of this blog here http://www.checkforrisk.com/kr.html
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