A rich range of features and functionality
Investigators at the bank called out several key features and functionality that are most valuable including:
Deep dives and Quick Analysis Flags
The reports generated by CLEAR are extensive, providing a deep dive across several categories of information. However, they also make key details immediately visible with Quick Analysis Flags. So, investigators can get a yes or no answer to a question such as whether a person has a criminal record, and they can then go to that section of the report and read more about it.
Analyzing risk
One favorite feature is the Risk Analysis Summary report. This pulls in data from a variety of sources and uses GenAI to provide a short risk profile summary describing what a particular business customer does, where the company is located, how long they have been in business, and if they appear on any sanctions or watch lists.
The analyst explains, “The CLEAR software gathers data from so many sources, and it gives it to me in a matter of seconds. Without it, it takes me maybe about an hour to do that risk analysis on my own. So, the Risk Analysis Summary is one of those features that I absolutely love, because it’s a time saver. It’s accurate, and it targets my objective to mitigate risk because it basically tells me what the risk is with a business.”
Uncovering criminal history
Features that allow investigators to trace someone’s criminal history are also very useful. In one instance, an analyst was able to identify that a senior staff member at a customer’s business had been convicted of a lottery scam by cross-reference details of the business and its key personnel through CLEAR.
Clarifying property ownership
Given how common it is for criminals to launder money through property, as well as via shell companies or vehicles, the ability to provide an individual’s property ownership history is another well-used aspect of CLEAR.
“One of my colleagues relies on it for finding out about property ownership. We would have customers doing transactions who say, ‘Hey, you know what, I got all this money from selling my house.’ And we can cross reference it in CLEAR to verify if that’s true, based on their property ownership history,” the analyst adds.
Identifying MSBs
A further timesaving, compliance-enhancing feature is that CLEAR reports indicate if a customer is a registered money service business (MSB). “If our customer is an MSB, we have to know about it and conduct a profile on that customer. If we didn’t already have that information, Thomson Reuters Risk & Fraud Solutions let us know, and then we can properly tag that customer as an MSB,” he says.