Case Study: Medium Sized Financial Institution

The Problem

A medium sized financial institution needs to quickly screen new customers and have matches remediated by a trained compliance officer. In addition all existing customers must be revalidated on a periodic basis to pick up additions to the watch list or changes in customer information. If no changes have occurred either in the watch data or the customer data then the compliance officer should not have to review matches that are identical to the initial customer screening.

The Solution

The institution set up two screening processes: one to screen new customers with the Sentinel real time API, and a second monthly batch process to screen their entire account list. The real time API was integrated directly into the back office system that created new customers. If a new customer successfully passed the screening process the account opening procedure continued, if a match was found the account was put on hold until a compliance officer could review the matching data.

The monthly revalidation process extracted the most recent copy of customer data from the source system and submitted the data to Sentinel as a batch process. Sentinel was configured with the "New Data Alert – User Account and Name" option. This ensured that if a customer was previously cleared by a compliance officer the account would only need to be reviewed if new matching data was found on the watch list. Sentinel process all customer data in less than 20 minutes and made the results available to the compliance team through an online reporting module.

The Benefits

• Quick review of customer data - New customers are immediately screened allowing accounts to be automatically approved or quickly approved or denied.
• Fast Integration - Because no software was installed in house the only IT task was setting up the batch process and integrating the real time API with the account opening process. Setting up the batch process took approximately 2 hours. Integrating the real time API with the account opening process took three days.
• Less time spent on remediation - As part of the revalidation process only matches that contain new data are reviewed. This reduced the time spent by compliance officers on remediation by 75%.