Company News
Customer & Transaction Screening
Company News
Customer & Transaction Screening

Introducing Enigma Customer and Transaction Screening

27 million people are currently victims of human trafficking worldwide. They are being forced into labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of modern slavery. Human traffickers make an estimated $150 billion every year. 

Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans 18-45. The drug is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. The illicit drug trade is a $650 billion dollar business annually, greater than the entire GDP of Sweden.

Where does all that money go? Money laundering is the world’s 3rd largest business. An estimated 4 trillion dollars are illicitly laundered every year. The bulk of that comes from nefarious activities and organized crime.

To combat this, every financial institution is constantly combing through a vast matrix of data for markers of financial crime. Financial institutions filed over 251 million suspicious activity reports to U.S. regulators last year alone.

Sanctions are a critical measure towards combating financial crimes and serving our national security interests. Sanctions compliance is a greater challenge than ever before thanks to the rapidly evolving geopolitical stage. Enigma set out to make sanctions compliance a sure bet for highly regulated institutions in the most cost-effective, reliable and transparent manner possible.

Why We Built Enigma Customer and Transaction Screening

We have spent years closely collaborating with our customers to learn about the challenges they face in screening massive amounts of customers and transactions. Major problems included high operational costs associated with many false positive matches, throughput challenges due to the vast scale of customers and transactions, a lack of control over system configuration and performance, and shortcomings in the auditability and explainability of results to regulators. 

Five years ago, we were approached by one of our leading clients, a top-ten US bank, and were asked to help them overhaul their sanctions compliance program. Leveraging our entity resolution expertise, we developed a customer and transaction screening product that replaced the bank’s legacy screening solutions, both well-known vendor solutions in the space, vastly improving alert quality while assuring greater throughput, scalability and reliability. Upon go-live with our screening API, the bank realized a >75% reduction in alert volumes and millions of dollars per year in savings in operational overhead alone.

Our mission is to bring our state-of-the-art screening API to the broader ecosystem of clients and partners who are facing ever greater regulatory scrutiny in the fight against financial crimes and our nation’s and allies’ adversaries.  

How Enigma Customer and Transaction Screening Can Help You

Enigma's screening service is built for regulated institutions that have a massive quantity of customers and transactions that need to be screened. Cloud-based and API-enabled, our service seamlessly integrates with the watchlists and case manager of your choice. Enigma Customer and Transaction Screening currently screens more than 1 billion real-time requests per month (customers, wires, ACH, P2P), effortlessly auto-scaling as processing demands fluctuate. 

We provide customer screening both at the time of onboarding and on an ongoing basis for both persons and business entities, with options to fine tune screening of each according to your organization’s risk-appetite. We also batch monitor millions of customer records each night for any changes in sanctions status.

With fewer false positives and higher throughput, our transaction screening helps you put fewer transactions on hold due to compliance concerns. Enigma integrates with any type of transaction - wires, ACH/TCH, Zelle, etc. We have developed specialized free text screening to handle message body and transaction descriptions, while leveraging our entity screening service to assess transaction counterparties. The combination of the two assure the highest recall and precision possible in identifying suspicious transactions.

How do we differ from other solutions out there? Enigma Customer and Transaction Screening:

  • Prioritizes Precision: Enigma’s tried and true matching methods reduce traditional sanctions alert volumes (where >99% are false positives) by at least 80% to help you cut through the noise and prioritize real alerts impacting your business.
  • Covers Multiple Watchlists: You choose which list sources you want to screen. Enigma can provide curated lists relevant to your business requirements or can integrate with any other list providers. You can also add or remove specific customs list and keywords anytime.
  • Scales with High Throughput: Our cloud-based infrastructure autoscales, ensuring the ability to process large volumes of transactions and customers with low latency. We consistently surpass 1,500 requests per second throughput, and can go even faster.
  • Empowers Configurability & Control: Directly configure thresholds, adjust scoring weights, and create suppression and escalation rules anytime, with robust access controls to prevent undesired changes. No need to work with an account manager to make changes to your scoring model.
  • Allows for Auditability: Hit-level explanations are clear and intuitive. Enigma employs well-documented matching and scoring algorithms that are tunable and transparent to the end user. There is no black box: you can look up historical screening decisions and watchlist entity entity details anytime and understand the results.
  • Provides a Sandbox Environment: Sanctions and model risk teams can study the effects of adjusting system parameters or introducing new rules. Simply make the adjustments and run a batch test to see the impact. Privileged users can evaluate specific screening requests and decisions on demand, anytime they want

How to Learn More

We offer registered Enigma users access to an evaluation version of our screening console, wherein you can submit customer screening requests against OFAC lists. You will see first hand the flexibility with which you can include varying degrees of identifiable information to increase the accuracy of the hits, as well as how you can configure relevance weights for each attribute screened, among other system parameters that affect scoring and alerting. The evaluation console is currently limited to customer screening only -- transaction screening is not yet open for public evaluation but soon will be. 

We also invite you to learn more about our sanctions API for more programmatic interaction with our screening endpoint. From there, we can guide you through the steps necessary to integrate with any watchlists of your choosing, including custom lists, as well as any case manager that suits your preference. Because our API is list and case manager agnostic, it allows our clients to tailor the screening endpoint to satisfy their needs, budget and volume demands.

To get complimentary access to our evaluation console and API, please register for free.

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