Pursuant to the USA Patriot Act of 2001, Know Your Customer (KYC) is mandatory for all US banks. The objective of KYC guidelines is to prevent banks from being used by criminal elements for money laundering activities.
For Customer Due Diligence (CDD) KYC processes, you are usually limited to a point in time criminal background check with many false negatives because:
- Standard checks are a 1-time snapshot of potential criminal background that:
- Are often reliant on data that is incomplete and several months old
- Is not updated in real time if something in that person’s criminal background were to change since the last data capture
- Only captures convictions, not all arrests and criminal history
These limitations create huge risks for financial institutions since it materially increases the chances of a bank or other institution supporting criminal activity, subjecting it to fines, sanctions and tremendous reputational risk.
According to experts, up to $300 billion is laundered through the United States each year. In 2020 alone, global banks were hit with $10.4 billion in fines for money laundering violations.
Even sophisticated banks with leading KYC tools and processes are vulnerable. Capital One, for instance, was ordered to pay out $390 million in 2021 for KYC-related failures.
=> Your current KYC tools and methods are not sufficiently protecting you.
Biometrica’s eMotive can help: eMotive pulls criminal data from 100s of locations around the country and around the world every hour on the hour 24h/day, 7 days/week to provide the world’s only real-time continuous criminal background check.
