New initiatives taking aim at corporate due diligence and sanctions screening for the supply chain should ease the burden of overworked treasurers facing ever-changing regulatory requirements.
Corporate compliance and due diligence headaches may be easing, as a number of new services have been launched to help companies screen suppliers against global sanctions lists. Ever-increasing regulatory requirements, including broader monitoring and compliance obligations, and ever-changing sanctions and embargo lists, present an ongoing challenge for corporate treasurers. These new toolsets—aimed at making it easier to maintain compliance—should make the treasurer’s relentlessly expanding role just a little bit easier.
During the Sibos conference, much ado was made of Swift’s new Name Screening service—a hosted cloud-based service that lets companies and financial institutions do online, search-engine-style research on individual names. The Name Screening utility acts as an “all-in-one screening solution that is fast and secure, as well as easy and cost-effective to implement,” says Luc Meurant, head of the Compliance Services Division at Swift.
The utility complements Swift’s existing Sanctions Screening product, and uses a best-in-breed screening engine and advanced database technology to standardize public sanctions lists, in order to “increase accuracy and reduce false positives,” noted the firm. According to Swift, using the hosted utility service options to screen client and supplier names will let corporates “achieve effective sanctions compliance and customer due diligence.”
It screens against global government sanctions lists and firms’ proprietary lists, along with lists of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and Relatives and Close Associates (RCAs), with risk and compliance data supplied by Dow Jones. “Over time, Name Screening will expand to include automated batch screening of entire databases—such as consumer and supplier lists,” Swift noted.
And the Name Screening initiative is not the only news in compliance screening for corporates. Treasury workstation provider Bellin has just announced that it will offer integrated sanctions and compliance screening for corporate clients via a solution from Accuity.
“Businesses need to include additional security measures in their workflows in order to avoid making illegal payments which could lead to frozen payments, large fines and reputational damage,” noted Bellin in a release.
