Sayari Propels Remote’s Operational Risk Team Toward Reliable, Frictionless AML

Remote empowers companies to hire global talent by streamlining international HR workflows, including payroll, benefits, compliance, taxes, stock options, relocation, and more. Its Operational Risk team, responsible for anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and customer onboarding functions, runs all prospective customers through a series of checks and validations designed to protect the company from illicit actors and other types of operational risk.

Senior AML Analyst Helena Carias works to make Remote’s onboarding process as efficient and customer-friendly as possible using automation, a mandate made all the more challenging by the company’s mission to serve customers anywhere in the world.

“It’s very hard to build a verification procedure when registries, company types, and regulations all differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” Carias explains.

Remote needed a vendor that could help obtain the necessary onboarding resources regardless of a customer’s location. “It was a matter not just of data coverage,” says Carias, “but of data quality.”

Sayari provides the most comprehensive commercial risk intelligence data on the market, offering corporate ownership data, global trade data, regulatory lists, adverse media, and negative news for 1.4 billion entities across more than 250 jurisdictions worldwide. The core of this data set consists of carefully sourced official public records derived from authoritative government registries, and all information maintains provenance to its original source.

As a regular attendee of Sayari’s ongoing investigative masterclass series, Carias was familiar with its commitment to public data and saw this as an asset. Public data’s shareability and reliability make it a cost-effective means of performing due diligence on an international clientele.

Remote deployed Sayari’s flagship risk intelligence platform, Sayari Graph, in winter of 2022 and has since seen vast efficiency improvements. “The ability to gather data from publicly available sources means that we create an onboarding procedure that creates as little friction as possible, and Sayari has been a great partner in helping us achieve that.”

In light of her team’s success with Sayari Graph, Carias has begun to explore the possibility of leveraging Sayari’s API as part of her onboarding automation initiative, which would help low-risk customers onboard faster while giving analysts more time to devote to complex investigations.

“We will continue to need Graph because it provides the user-friendly interface and enhanced investigation tools we need for manual checks on higher-risk customers,” she says, “But the API was always the end goal.”

Carias and her team kicked off the API implementation phase earlier this summer and are currently in the midst of testing the data’s coverage and quality. Early experiments suggest that Sayari returns results for 84% of Remote’s customer base.

“We want to automate as much of the onboarding process as possible, but we can only do that if the API data we’re getting proves good enough for us to make that move. And so far, I think it has.”

Sayari analysts will continue to work with Remote to validate and implement the API. Carias hopes to begin using it to process customers in the very near future.

“Our partnership with Sayari is instrumental to our goal of building a safe, sustainable onboarding procedure.”