Business Watchlist Report

Overview

The Business Watchlist Report is a Report that enriches existing information on a given business and screens that business across 100+ global sanction and warning lists. 

Use case

Organizations are able to use this report type to satisfy their watchlist screening AML regulatory requirements. Any organization running a KYB program will need to ensure that they're screening against 100+ global sanction and warning lists in order to ensure compliance to these regulations.

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Definition of Outputs

• Sanctions - Many organizations are required to run Sanctions screenings on their users to ensure that their organization is compliant with anti-money laundering (AML) laws. Sanctions lists are lists of individuals curated by governments and international organizations to impose economic sanctions (punitive measures resulting from failure to comply with a law) on individuals who have committed financial or other crimes. What does this actually mean? It means governments across the world maintain sanctions lists that tell organizations whether they can or cannot interact with an individual. Organizations are required to screen individuals to understand whether they’re on the sanctions list and then take proper action to ensure they’re not working with individuals who do show up on the list. If an individual has a hit on a Sanctions list, it’s possible that the inputs (first and last name, and sometimes date of birth) showed up as a match on the list. Persona will report the hit, and the output will be a match. Organizations determine how to proceed with that individual based on the results.
• Warnings - Similar to sanctions lists, warnings lists are also put together by governments and international organizations. These are lists of individuals, legal entities, or vessels issued by relevant law enforcement or regulatory bodies. Entities on warnings lists are either involved in law-breaking activities at the international level or in particular jurisdictions under investigation or found guilty of regulatory breaches in their operating industry, which may indicate a significant financial, compliance, or reputational risk. This information can be used by organizations running these reports when determining whether or not to engage in a business relationship with potential customers, counterparties, and suppliers. It might equally be useful when making payments and determining whether or not a payment is being made in the furtherance of a crime or as part of a financial crime, such as a money-laundering or insider trading scheme.

Notifications, recurrence, and match requirements

Most organizations using this report want to ensure they receive a notification immediately once a business has hit one of these lists. Organizations that want to be notified immediately on a match can set up a webhook against the report/business-watchlist.matched event to get an alert in their system.

Additionally, continuous monitoring is available for this report at the organization's request. The Report can be set to recur at any cadence requested. Persona commonly sees organizations running daily, monthly, or quarterly recurring reports. This is up to the organization's compliance requirements. 

Persona's Business Watchlist Report offers highly configurable search configurations, which is instrumental to organizations using this Report to reduce false positive hits and ensure manual review is decreased. Don't hesitate to contact your Persona POC to learn more about the possible match configurations for your Business Watchlist Report.

FAQs

How does the Business Watchlist report work?

Organizations pass in a business name. Then, based on the search configuration and list selection, Persona will search for this business name against the set of lists specified.

What lists can Persona search against?

Persona can search across 100+ global sanctions and warnings, including OFAC and the EU Sanctions List. Please contact the Persona support team if you have any questions regarding our lists.

Disclaimer

Persona is not a consumer reporting agency and the services (and the data provided as part of its services) do not constitute a ‘consumer report’ for the purposes of the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). The data and reports we provide to you may not be used, in whole or in part, to: make any consumer debt collection decision, establish a consumer’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, government benefits, or housing, or for any other purpose authorized under the FCRA. If you use any of any of our services, you agree not to use them, or the data, for any purpose authorized under the FCRA or in relation to taking an adverse action relating to a consumer application.