Local and global legislation is forcing businesses to take control over the accuracy and reliability of their information. Although required by policy and law, compliance can move from being a cost to a global competitive advantage.
That`s the view of Lizette Sander, Identity Systems Product Manager of Bateleur Software, who says one of the greatest challenges facing organisations today is the ever-increasing list of regulations, data sources and participating countries.
"It`s a high risk situation," she says. "Identity information such as names and addresses is inevitably prone to errors and variations, and compliance lists are far from perfect. To complicate matters further, new mechanisms for money laundering and illegal financing are constantly being discovered, resulting in ongoing changes in compliance regulations."
Sanctions for compliance failure can involve not only millions of rands in fines, but also significant commercial penalties and damage to the company`s public image. To protect themselves against these dangers, companies need an enterprise-wide, consistent and reliable approach to data matching, including a customer central search solution for reverse lookups.
In Sander`s opinion, the solution should include fast, accurate and reliable identification and screening of individuals and businesses as well as the ability to handle error and variation in names, addresses, company names and other identity data, despite the source or country of origin of the data.
"The search engine has to be flexible enough to provide different results according to varying business needs and data sources," she says. "Even with a flexible search engine, the compliance process as a whole has to be agile enough to accommodate changes even after it is brought into production, like changes in the business rules, new data sources and new compliance regulations."
Bateleur Software is the South African distributor for Identity Systems, a worldwide leader in identity searching and matching technology. All of Identity Systems` products offer multiple options for tuning searches and matches, without the need of complex customisation.
Most compliance regulations mandate a screening of the customer base for entities in the current lists and every time new entities are added or updated. Although this reverse lookup can be made against all customer data sources, Sander says having a central customer index can significantly improve the efficiency, precision and value of the process.
"A central index simplifies the search process by bringing all the different data sources to a single data structure on a single platform," she says. "This can significantly increase the match quality due to the data aggregation and entities grouping."
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