A US property and casualty insurance company’s AML compliance efforts faced the dual challenge of high false positives and inefficiencies throughout its case review process. Concerns about data quality and the potential risk of missing true high-risk activity prompted the company to enlist the expertise of FinScan to address the various issues affecting its screening program.
Challenges and Goals
The insurance company confronted several critical challenges and set clear goals:
High false positives: The company experienced a significant volume of false positives, leading to inefficiencies in its case review process.
Data quality concerns: Data accuracy and completeness issues raised the risk of missing true high-risk activity and potential fines.
Duplicate records: More than 20% of customer records were duplicates, impacting the efficiency of the alert review process.
The Solution
The insurance company implemented FinScan’s comprehensive AML compliance solution to provide:
Data quality assessment: A thorough data quality assessment revealed key issues that could lead to false negatives, including missing date of birth information for 2.4 million records, absence of first names for 18,000 records, and the presence of multiple names combined in the name field for 40,000 records. Furthermore, more than 20% of customer records were identified as duplicates.
Duplicate record management: Utilizing FinScan Enhance, the company effectively identified, linked, and consolidated duplicate records from various source applications. This eliminated the need to review the same alert multiple times and ensured screening results were fed back into the originating applications seamlessly.
Matching algorithm refinement: FinScan’s matching algorithms were fine-tuned to assign greater importance to crucial information such as name, gender, and country, while using date of birth as a secondary matching criterion. This strategy prevented incomplete data from negatively affecting screening results and enhanced matching accuracy for records with complete information.
Data quality enhancement: FinScan’s data quality capabilities were leveraged to analyze 2.8 million records and create new records where necessary, ensuring 100% of customers were screened against the OFAC list.
The removal of 560,000 duplicate alerts saved 2,796 hours of manual review time annually, equal to $75,000 in full-time equivalent (FTE) costs.
Our Impact
The company’s implementation of FinScan resulted in significant achievements for the insurance company including:
Risk mitigation: By correcting data errors and uncovering more than 400 customers on the OFAC list, the company mitigated the risk of substantial fines if these discrepancies had gone undetected.
Efficiency gains: The removal of 560,000 duplicate alerts saved 2,796 hours of manual review time annually, equal to $75,000 in full-time equivalent (FTE) costs.
Enhanced compliance: Reduced risk and increased effectiveness of the company’s screening program proved invaluable to the success of its AML compliance efforts.
With FinScan, the insurance company successfully addressed its data quality challenges, mitigated risks, and significantly improved the efficiency of its AML compliance program. This transformation not only protected the company from potential fines but also strengthened its compliance capacity.
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