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Financial crime hides
in corporate structures.

Money laundering, fraud, and financial crime all rely on corporate layering to obscure beneficial owners and distance proceeds from their origin. Sayari maps the corporate infrastructure behind the financial activity.

THE REGULATORY REALITY
2%
of illicit financial flows are seized or frozen globally each year. The structural reason is that AML programs focused on financial transactions can’t see the corporate ownership layers designed specifically to defeat transaction monitoring.
UNODC Financial Crime Report 2024 · Sayari Research
THE PROBLEM

Why transaction monitoring alone misses financial crime

The structural gaps that point solutions can’t close.

01

Corporate layering defeats transaction monitoring

Illicit actors use multiple corporate entities to move funds in amounts and patterns that individually appear legitimate. No single transaction monitoring alert reveals the underlying corporate structure.

02

Beneficial owner opacity at alert stage

When a SAR alert is triggered, investigators spend most of their time researching the corporate structure rather than the financial activity. This is the most expensive and slowest part of the investigation.

03

Cross-jurisdiction structure blind spots

Complex financial crime structures span multiple jurisdictions specifically to exploit gaps in single-country financial intelligence. Investigators can’t see the full picture without cross-registry data integration.

THE SAYARI APPROACH

Corporate intelligence for financial crime investigation.

Sayari Graph provides financial crime investigators with instant access to beneficial ownership data, corporate network maps, and trade flow intelligence — dramatically accelerating the corporate structure research phase of every investigation.

Instant Beneficial Owner Resolution

Enter any entity from a SAR alert and receive a complete ownership chain to the ultimate beneficial owner — across 250+ jurisdictions in seconds.

Corporate Network Visualization

Sayari Graph’s visual interface maps the full corporate network of any subject — subsidiaries, affiliates, co-directors, and trade partners — for rapid investigative structuring.

Trade Flow Intelligence

Link financial activity to physical trade flows — identifying invoice fraud, trade-based money laundering, and commodity-linked financial crime patterns.

SAR Filing Support

Sayari produces source-cited entity reports formatted for SAR narrative documentation — reducing investigator research time and improving SAR quality.

aml_analysis.log
> Transaction Pattern Analysis
entity: “Novus Capital Holdings (UAE)”
✓ Resolved to canonical entity record
✓ 12 related payment entities identified
⚠ Circular transaction pattern detected
> Shell Company Chain
depth: 6 intermediaries · 4 jurisdictions
⚠ Panama → BVI → UAE → end beneficiary
✗ Beneficiary: OFAC SDN match (sanctioned)
sar.trigger(case=”NVS-0219″, typology=”layering”) → filed
Sayari Graph — AML transaction & network analysis
HOW IT WORKS

From data to decision

01
ALERT

Transaction monitoring triggers SAR investigation

A suspicious transaction pattern triggers an alert. The investigator submits the flagged entity to Sayari.

02
INVESTIGATE

Instant corporate network map

Sayari resolves the entity across 250+ jurisdictions and returns a complete ownership chain, network map, and related entity flags.

03
FILE

SAR-ready documentation

Source-cited entity profiles and network maps are ready for SAR narrative documentation — without additional manual research.

6B+

Records in Sayari’s world model for financial crime investigation

Sayari’s world model integrates corporate registry data, trade flow records, and financial intelligence from 250+ jurisdictions — giving financial crime investigators the cross-domain picture that complex money laundering structures are specifically designed to prevent.

Sayari Research · 2025
WHY SAYARI

Legacy tools vs Sayari

LEGACY TOOLS
Transaction data only — can’t see the corporate structure used to layer and integrate funds
Manual registry research for each SAR — days of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction investigation
No cross-jurisdiction integration — complex international structures require separate database queries
Incomplete SAR narratives — limited corporate intelligence leads to poor SAR quality and re-work
SAYARI
Corporate + financial + trade in one model — full structural picture from a single query
Instant UBO resolution — 250+ jurisdiction corporate network in seconds, not days
Cross-jurisdiction integration — no investigative blind spots across the registries illicit actors exploit
SAR-ready documentation — source-cited entity reports formatted for investigative and compliance use
CLIENT RESULTS

Measured outcomes from production deployments

EFFICIENCY
10×
Faster corporate network research vs manual registry investigation
COVERAGE
250+
Jurisdictions with corporate registry data for beneficial owner tracing
QUALITY
40%↑
SAR quality improvement measured by FinCEN feedback scores
PRODUCTS FOR THIS USE CASE

Sayari products that power this workflow

Sayari Graph
Entity resolution and ownership graph for 500M+ companies across 250+ jurisdictions.
Explore Sayari Graph →
Sayari Signal
Continuous monitoring that alerts on meaningful changes — not every record update.
Explore Sayari Signal →
Sayari API
Programmatic access to the full Sayari world model for integration into your workflows.
Explore Sayari API →
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Common questions about this use case

Sayari supports trade-based money laundering (TBML), sanctions evasion through shell networks, fentanyl and narcotics financing, real estate laundering, and beneficial ownership concealment typologies. The platform combines corporate registry, trade shipment, and financial exposure data to trace financial crime networks end-to-end.
By resolving entity identity through corporate registry data across 250+ jurisdictions, Sayari dramatically reduces false positive rates from name-matching alone. Analysts can confirm whether a flagged entity is the designated party, a related company, or an unrelated name match — in seconds rather than hours.
Yes. Sayari’s graph traversal engine maps ownership, directorship, and supply chain relationships between your counterparties and any designated entity — including indirect connections through intermediary companies that would not appear in a simple watchlist check.
Sayari Map links trade shipment records to corporate ownership networks, enabling analysts to identify shipment patterns consistent with over- or under-invoicing, trade with sanctioned jurisdictions through transshipment intermediaries, and shell companies with no apparent business purpose participating in trade flows.
Resources & Insights

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