A 2024 survey of banks found that between 2016 and 2023, the number of employee hours dedicated to complying with financial regulations and examiner mandates increased by 61 percent. In addition, the portion of bank IT budgets devoted to compliance grew by 40 percent. Despite these increases to labor hours and budgets, compliance challenges remain. For example, many studies indicate that financial institutions routinely see false positive rates of 90+ percent in their anti-money laundering (AML) operations.
Financial institutions (FIs) face growing challenges from illicit actors and the many regulations that rise in response. Overcoming these challenges—while maintaining business efficiency and customer satisfaction—requires new approaches in the fight against financial crime.
Core challenges facing financial institutions
Slow AML investigations
Combatting money laundering is a central responsibility of financial institutions. However, traditional approaches to AML often rely on time-consuming and error-prone manual data collection and verification and document preparation. FIs require faster methods to assess entities to uncover front companies and discover fraudulent networks.
>> Learn how Sayari helps ensure compliance with the new real estate AML rule <<
Manual customer onboarding
Getting a clear, comprehensive picture of who owns, controls, and profits from a customer’s business is often a manual process. Customer attrition and lost revenue are some of the resulting impacts. FIs must incorporate automated solutions that help balance the need for comprehensive risk management with the demand for an efficient client experience.
>> Discover how to detect FinCEN red flags during AML and KYC operations <<
Sanctions false positives
Sanctions false positives can occur in manual reviews, requiring additional requests for information and delayed payment release times. The resulting “alert fatigue” may result in compliance teams being slower to identify and act on true threats. FIs require continuous monitoring of global sanctions lists and efficient methods they can trust to correctly identify entities related to sanctioned entities or majority-owned by them.
>> Learn how a universal bank mitigated risk from Russian sanctions evasion tactics <<
Sayari: a solution to drive efficient compliance programs
Sayari helps FIs build efficient compliance programs—reducing false positives and accelerating legitimate business—with these unique differentiators:
- Harness the Most Comprehensive, Connected Model of Commercial Relationships: Sayari data includes detailed profiles on 800M companies and 763M individuals across 250+ jurisdictions worldwide, including hard-to-access regions like Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela. Financial institutions can conduct AML investigations faster with pre-computed counterparty networks—complete with unique identifiers, names, contact information, registration dates, and more—to effectively identify export control risk, uncover front companies, and discover fraudulent networks. In addition, Sayari’s import-export data for 70+ countries helps identify risk of transshipment to sanctioned entities and other blacklisted parties.
- Get In-Platform Access to Official Evidentiary Documentation: All records in Sayari refer directly to authoritative sources to facilitate in-depth investigation and reporting. Teams can easily substantiate findings with timestamped records citing court-admissible documents.
- Leverage Automatic Flagging and Passive Monitoring of 200+ Core Risk Factors: Sayari streamlines customer due diligence and onboarding with automated risk monitoring for sanctions, export controls, and reputational risk. Automatic alerts identify both watchlist changes and dozens of non-obvious risk types.
- Access Comprehensive Entity Profiles: Sayari data provides beneficial ownership information for both risky and non-risky entities, streamlining whitelisting and minimizing false positives—without all the manual work.
Our financial and banking customers rely on Sayari to underpin efficient AML and KYC operations. To discover why a risk director at a leading multinational financial institution sees Sayari as “an important addition to any institutional risk analyst’s toolset,” request a demo.
