Under EU Directive 2015/849 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering or terrorist financing, it is ...necessary to identify both individuals and transactions of a certain degree of risk. The process of identifying the risk of both customers and transactions considered suspicious lies at the root of systems aimed at preventing money laundering and terrorist financing. Such systems are called AML (Anti-Money Laundering) systems. An important step in calculating a client's risk is to check his / her existence in lists of suspicious or possibly suspicious persons, also called sanction lists. Classic search methods involve large processing capabilities. Taking into account the obligation of all financial institutions to implement these methods, there is a need to implement a fast and secure search flow. Therefore, the attention was drawn to the searching techniques for artificial intelligence. These kinds of methods include advanced machine learning for optimizing the whole searching process: the system is able to detect certain patterns and identify new ones based on certain characteristics of the search query and by identifying similarities between words.
Abstract
The United Nations targeted sanctions against terrorist organizations are administrated under the Security Council Consolidated List. Apart from listing terrorist organizations and ...individuals that are linked to Al-Qaida, ISIL, and the Taliban, the list also includes non-terrorist entities that allegedly support listed organizations. This paper studies 7 businesses and 22 humanitarian organizations that are currently listed, resulting in two insights. First, listing these entities effectively pushes them out of business by rendering them illegal. Even when entities succeed in getting delisted, the damage is already done. Ironically, the impact on non-terrorist entities is bigger than on some terrorist organizations, who carry their listing as a badge of honor to attract recruits. Second, by comparing the UNSC consolidated list to related Interpol’s Special Notices, we find that there are several inconsistencies between the lists, both in terms of the details provided and the updating of unlisted entities.
Using efficient searching techniques on sanctions list and press articles allows a better filtering on individuals and entities to establish a commercial relationship with, including those who are ...going to have access to confidential information belonging to the company, in order to minimize the risk of leakage or information mismanagement. That process of filtering on individuals or entities could be automated by using individualization algorithms, searching techniques based on string comparisons, artificial intelligence, and facial recognition. Diverse methods were examined to be applied on each mentioned technique in order to identify which ones are ideal to its application on individualization due to their characteristics, in order to obtain agile and reliable results; taking into account that different methods are complementary and not exclusive, and that their combination allows to minimize human interaction in the classification of information, avoiding analysis of data irrelevant for that particular search.
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