Sayari Propels Remote’s Operational Risk Team Toward Reliable, Frictionless AML
Global HR Solution Cites 84% Customer Coverage by Sayari
Remote Selects Sayari to Support its Accelerated Onboarding Initiative
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.”
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.
I had to type the same name into 52 different registries to find a company. We always struggled to check U.S. companies before Sayari.
Advanced Entity Resolution Accelerates Time to Insight
Remote is a fully international company with customers all around the world, including a large presence in the United States. Because companies can be registered in any number of states under a variety of names, Operational Risk Analyst Elizabetta Aceti would often struggle to track down prospective U.S. customers’ certificates of incorporation.
“I had to type the same name into 52 different registries to find a company,” she recalls. “We always struggled to check U.S. companies before Sayari.”
Sayari’s entity disambiguation algorithms automatically determine whether two records are likely referring to the same real-world entity — even if some of that entity’s attributes, such as name and address, differ between records. As critical as it is time-consuming, entity disambiguation requires a great deal of technical knowhow and has historically proven difficult to automate. Sayari, however, eliminates the bulk of this manual research by either confidently resolving entities together or providing investigators with the disambiguation data they need to make a final call.
“We also sometimes see companies registered in the U.S. but owned by foreign entities,” says Aceti. “Sayari’s entity resolution makes it much easier to verify these types of companies.”
Verifying customers used to take considerably longer and require more customer touches. Aceti and her team used to have to partner with Customer Service to formulate document requests, wait for the response, and repeat the process as many times as it took to get the customer verified.
“Now,” says Aceti, “verifications can take as little as 20 minutes.”
Remote Operational Risk Team Initiates Sayari API Integration
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.”
Our partnership with Sayari is instrumental to our goal of building a safe, sustainable onboarding procedure.
About Sayari
Sayari provides global corporate transparency and supply chain risk identification for government and industry. Its commercial risk intelligence software harvests comprehensive corporate and trade data from more than 250 jurisdictions worldwide and surfaces previously hidden risk insights in an intuitive network analysis platform.
Since its founding in 2015, Sayari has earned the trust of top financial institutions, Fortune 100 corporations, and government agencies, securing a $40M Series C in 2021. Sayari is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and its solutions are used by thousands of frontline analysts in 35 countries.
About Remote
Talent is everywhere — opportunity is not. Remote closes the gap by enabling employers to hire anyone from anywhere, providing access to opportunity so people everywhere can build better lives. Remote helps companies become global powerhouses by expanding their access to talent beyond their borders. Thousands of businesses rely on Remote’s modern platform and legal, financial, and cultural expertise to onboard, pay, and manage employees and contractors in 150+ countries. Remote was founded in 2019 by Job van der Voort and Marcelo Lebre, and is backed by leading investors including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Accel, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, General Catalyst and B Capital.
Surface the Insights that Protect Global Business
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