Honeywell Sets a New Standard for Third-Party Risk Screening with Sayari
By supplanting legacy data solutions, Honeywell has elevated its program to a new level of global corporate compliance.
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The Challenge
Honeywell’s legacy provider relied on aggregated, secondary data that lacked the depth required for complex jurisdictions like China and Latin America. This forced compliance officers to spend 75% of their time manually verifying records, leaving only 25% for risk analysis.
A Pilot of Sayari Graph
In August 2024, Ben Seager, Integrity and Compliance Manager for Honeywell’s Compliance Governance Center of Excellence (COE), piloted Sayari Graph to address critical intelligence gaps in high-risk jurisdictions.
95% Coverage and Regulatory Parity
During rigorous side-by-side testing, Sayari Graph resolved the “China Blind Spot,” returning actionable intelligence for 95% of entities screened—a massive leap over the previous provider’s coverage.
The Challenge
Closing the Coverage Gap
Faced with increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, Honeywell (Nasdaq: HON), a Fortune 100 industrial technology leader, looked to improve compliance efficiency by automating its third-party screening and due diligence processes. As a top multinational integrated operating company focused on automation, aviation, and energy transition, the company needed the visibility to efficiently safeguard its highly complex, heavily scrutinized third-party networks.
Honeywell’s legacy provider relied on aggregated, secondary data that lacked the depth required for complex jurisdictions like China and Latin America. This forced compliance officers to spend 75% of their time manually verifying records, leaving only 25% for risk analysis. Even with manual intervention, the team encountered situations that required added manual effort to confidently identify Military End Users (MEUs) and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) hidden within opaque Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) structures—potential exposures that require direct access to primary-source corporate registries. As contract costs for these legacy tools continued to rise despite these persistent coverage gaps, Honeywell sought a more transparent and cost-effective primary-source solution.
Chief Compliance Officer and Deputy General Counsel Vic Miller sought to eliminate the “data assembly” tax—the 75% of analyst time wasted manually stitching together disparate records for Honeywell’s hundreds of thousands of annual screenings. To achieve compliance at scale, Honeywell required a unified data layer that could bypass the limitations of legacy aggregators and provide the same primary-source transparency used by federal regulators. By moving from manual collection to Sayari’s pre-linked knowledge graph, the goal was to pivot the team’s focus toward high-value risk adjudication and defensible decision-making.
- Aggregated, secondary data with limited depth in China and Latin America
- 75% of analyst time spent manually verifying records instead of risk analysis
- Hidden Military End Users (MEUs) and State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) inside opaque
- Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) structures
- Rising contract costs despite persistent coverage gaps
The Solution
Impact
Impact
In August 2024, Ben Seager, Integrity and Compliance Manager for Honeywell’s Compliance Governance Center of Excellence (COE), piloted Sayari Graph to address critical intelligence gaps in high-risk jurisdictions.
During rigorous side-by-side testing, Sayari Graph resolved the “China Blind Spot,” returning actionable intelligence for 95% of entities screened—a massive leap over the previous provider’s coverage. This success was driven by Sayari’s ability to map non-obvious relationships and state-owned ties that traditional databases miss.
- Regulatory Parity: Honeywell now operates with the same primary-source data used by the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), ensuring alignment with federal enforcement standards.
- Audit-Ready Provenance: Every finding is backed by the original source, shifting compliance from “risk scoring” to “evidence-based adjudication.
- Accelerated Whitelisting: With a 95% hit rate and full ownership context, the team can confidently reduce false positives that stall global operations.
The Results
Honeywell’s Use of Sayari Makes Real-Time, Persistent Diligence Possible
By establishing Sayari as their global data standard, Honeywell’s Due Diligence Center of Excellence is moving beyond reactive screening to proactive, industry-leading best practices. This partnership ensures that as trade regulations become more granular, Honeywell maintains a view of their supply chain through the same high-fidelity lens used by national security agencies.
Honeywell’s strategy is to transform compliance into a growth enabler. By leveraging Sayari’s data, the company can act as a bulwark against illicit activity, human rights abuses, and national security threats without adversely impacting their growth goals.
As Honeywell navigates the complex separation of its chemical, automation, and aerospace business units, Sayari’s graph-based architecture provides the necessary compliance portability. The growing partnership ensures that both the parent company and the new spin-offs inherit a gold standard of risk visibility from day one.
95%
Hit rate on entities the legacy provider couldn’t resolve
75%
Analyst time reclaimed for high-value risk adjudication
1
Global data standard aligned with U.S. BIS enforcement
If we were unable to find an entity in other solutions, 95% of the time we could find it in Sayari.
Ben Seager
Integrity and Compliance Manager, Compliance Governance COE | Honeywell