Neotas Customer Due Diligence FAQs
Customer Due Diligence (CDD) is a process that businesses and financial institutions undertake to verify the identity of their customers, assess their risk profile, and understand the nature of the business relationship. The primary objective of CDD is to prevent money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes.
The CDD process typically involves the following steps:
Customer Identification: Obtaining and verifying the customer’s identity using reliable and independent documents, data, or information.
Customer Verification: Confirming the accuracy of the provided information through various means, such as government-issued IDs, utility bills, or credit reports.
Understanding the Business Relationship: Determining the purpose and nature of the business relationship with the customer to identify any potential risks.
Risk Assessment: Evaluating the customer’s risk profile based on factors such as the source of funds, type of business, geographic location, and transaction patterns.
Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD): In cases of high-risk customers, transactions, or countries, conducting enhanced due diligence with more in-depth investigations and monitoring.
Ongoing Monitoring: Continuously monitoring the customer’s transactions and activities to detect any suspicious or unusual behavior.
Reporting: Filing suspicious activity reports (SARs) to the relevant authorities if any potential money laundering or illegal activities are identified.
Customer Due Diligence is a crucial component of an effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorism Financing (CTF) program. By performing CDD, businesses can better understand their customers, identify and mitigate potential risks, and comply with regulatory requirements to maintain the integrity of the financial system.
Find below a selection of FAQs we face relating to Customer Due Diligence, our investigative Platform and Due Diligence Reports.
I already conduct KYC checks. What value would Neotas add?
Neotas goes beyond current and traditional KYC checks by ‘spidering out’ across the Internet, aggregating and analysing vast amounts of data at speed. We bring you additional customer data, for example through social media networks, surface and deep web sources. We provide you with a single view of risk, with insights delivered in one single place. We help you remove your blindspots and build a clearer risk profile of customers, in an easy and compliant way.
Why is it important to include open source intelligence in customer due diligence checks?
Neotas adds valuable insight from unstructured and structured sources that are currently under-utilised. The regulators are increasingly stating the importance of using open source intelligence for customer due diligence (FG 18/5, FCA). Open sources include social media, surface web and deep web data and we are specialists in ‘joining the dots’ between disparate data sources, so that you have a complete risk profile of customers.
Can Neotas be used for perpetual KYC?
Absolutely. Our Platform can be used to monitor customer risk data on an ongoing basis, without false positives. This is particularly useful as the risk profile of customers can change over time and database checks provide ‘point in time’ information, whereas our Platform monitors risk in almost real-time and consistently.
If this is quicker than traditional KYC, will it still capture as much information?
We capture more information than traditional KYC, as we aggregate and analyse data from the largest traditional databases in the world, as well as 100% of publicly available online data. Our Platform interrogates data at speed and ‘joins the dots’ between disparate data sources. All the information is made available to you at the click of a button, in one single place.
How does Neotas successfully discover fraud amongst unconnected parties?
We interrogate vast amounts of information at speed and our ability to ‘connect the dots’ between disparate data sources enables us to identify risk, including fraud. We have discovered fraud amongst unconnected parties by, for instance, uncovering aliases used by individuals.
Does finding additional fraud mean greater work to solve the problems?
There have been numerous instances where we’ve found instances of fraud where others have not found it. We pride ourselves on being able to uncover risks quickly and efficiently, which means that you can be rest assured you will solve the problems effectively.
In addition to database checks, what is the value that Neotas brings?
We provide database checks alongside the power of open source intelligence, which means we interrogate and analyse open sources (publicly available data) at speed. The additional insights from open source intelligence helps you to make decisions more effectively. This gives you peace of mind that your blind spots are covered.
If I’m a member of a junior analyst team, how will Neotas’ Platform help me conduct investigations?
The Neotas Platform will help you conduct your investigations more effectively and efficiently, saving you at least 25% of your time. The Platform provides a richer and more complete profile of customers with greater:
- Speed and ease of use: our Platform can conduct ‘built-in’ investigations in seconds as opposed to days and hours. The Platform is also easy to use.
- Coverage: we cover traditional third party databases, the entire internet (surface, deep and dark web), bringing them all together in a single view.
- Depth: we automatically gather and analyse data using AI and machine learning, pulling information which others do not. This provides unique insights into behavioural attributes, reputation and connections that are not in any databases.
How are you different to entity resolution?
We focus on the live data that exists outside of banks or financial institutions. This data comes in many forms, including social media, customer/employee reviews, adverse media, surface web and deep web sources, etc. We give you clear risk insights by analysing this data at speed and bringing it all together in one place.
I use a lot of third party providers, which is difficult and time consuming. How can Neotas help solve this problem?
Our Platform ‘joins the dots’ between disparate data sources, including your existing third party providers, which are integrated into one centralised hub. We provide you with a single view of all risks uncovered, helping you to make your processes more effective and efficient.
If your question hasn’t been answered here, then we would love to hear from you. Contact us directly, or schedule a call below.
