As Bitcoin gains recognition as a legitimate currency in the world of digital transactions, FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) has issued guidance on the regulations that apply to administrators and exchangers of virtual currencies that will test AML and KYC programs.
Swings in the market value of Bitcoins – tied to limited circulation […]
New York – 19 September 2013: Alacra, Inc., a leading provider of business information solutions for financial institutions and professional service firms announced the release of the Alacra Periodic Table of Business Research Databases. The new […]
Today we updated the Periodic Table of Entity and Security Identifiers to help our friends in compliance and in the reference data worlds keep track of the many identifiers around the world. It’s been an entire year since our first pass at organizing this detail, so there are several changes. With the advent of […]
Increasingly, Alacra Compliance Enterprise customers and prospects are asking us to facilitate the inclusion of FATCA client classification information in their onboarding […]
DealMeme is a new, free service from Alacra to help you monitor merger and acquisitions around the world.
DealMeme uses the AlacraPulse Curation Engine, which sifts through 3,000 respected traditional media and influential blog sources, which are continuously vetted to maintain top standards. […]
We responded to a number of calls following our post last week highlighting the challenges faced by the CICI Utility with regard to self-registration. One call came from a senior executive of the DTCC, who carefully explained that many of the data issues we highlighted were the result of business rules being applied to […]
Last week we fielded several phone calls from clients asking about what other challenges the CICI Utility might be facing in addition to the duplicates and empty fields that were described in a recent article from Waters Technology: Data Validator Criticizes DTCC’s Identifier Database. We’re major supporters of the Legal Entity Identifier […]
All the financial institutions we’ve worked with have deployed a transaction monitoring system that alerts the bank to suspicious activity. Sophisticated financial institutions have entities exhibiting unusual activity automatically sent to the due diligence team for review. This review results in the KYC information for that entity being updated.
Firms also monitor or refresh their customer […]
Again, communication is critical. Those firms that utilized electronic communication from the relationship manager to the onboarding team had better processes overall. In some cases searches of various databases (sanctions lists, PEPs, adverse news) were run automatically on the verified customer name from the relationship management system. This eliminated re-keying of data, which is a […]
Nowhere in the regulations are financial institutions instructed to use a proprietary database or conduct a proscribed level of research when onboarding a new customer or counterparty. Yet this is where the bulk of the money is spent: in database costs, workflow tools, and investigative labor. As this is where the money is, we have […]
