For financial institutions, the complexity of compliance with global financial crime and fraud prevention regulations can be overwhelming. Yet at the heart of overcoming this complexity lies a simple truth: great contact data is the backbone of trust and effective compliance. Building that trust means more than checking a box on a compliance form. It demands accurate, real-world connections that link every customer to a genuine identity.
Let’s take a closer look at how to turn complexity into confidence, starting with the crucial step of getting contact data right.
Step 1: Prioritize High-Quality, Verified Contact Data
The cornerstone of compliance is data quality, specifically accurate and reliable contact data for every customer. Most identity verification processes simply check whether an address exists or is valid, but that’s not enough.
Identity is not proven by a valid address alone, but rather, its direct connection to a verified individual or business. Optimized data quality tools can standardize, parse and validate addresses across the globe, considering cultural name variations, suffixes, and diacritics (the accents and marks that denote pronunciation), and more. Names and addresses should be linked in real-time, catching mismatches that may be red flags for fraud or compliance failures. These tools can significantly reduce the occurrence of false positives and negatives. Verification becomes not just a check, but a real-world connection and an anchor of trust that flows through the entire compliance process.
Financial institutions should start by ensuring customer contact data is accurate and tied to the right party. This creates a foundation for every other layer of compliance.
Step 2: Embrace Mobile Identity Verification for Customer Convenience
Most people use mobile phones, and mobile numbers continue to gain traction as a common digital identity standard, readily available for a secure and frictionless customer onboarding experience. One effective approach involves verifying user identities directly through mobile network operator (MNO) data, an emerging standard in over 14 countries.
Empowering financial institutions with direct access to MNO data for identity authentication creates a faster, more convenient mobile-first process for customers.
Step 3: Use Advanced eIDV Platforms for Real-Time Verification
Electronic identity verification (eIDV) platforms can connect billions of data records from trusted global sources to perform real-time cross-checks of names, addresses, emails and phone numbers as well as eliminate labor-intensive manual checks. These platforms help ensure customer onboarding remains fast and smooth and that institutions seamlessly defend against fraud.
Step 4: Conduct Comprehensive KYB Checks
Know your business (KYB) operations help financial institutions battle the impact of fraudulent shell companies that can hide in plain sight. Integrated KYB solutions confirm the legitimacy of businesses and suppliers while aligning a bank’s systems with international regulations for anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism.
Step 5: Integrate Sanctions and PEP Screening
True compliance requires always-on, globally updated screening of watchlists, including sanctions and politically exposed persons (PEPs). This necessitates solutions that address this challenge by pulling in authoritative, real-time data from worldwide sources. Financial institutions meet the letter of the law and protect themselves from reputational damage.
Turning Data into Trust
According to Juniper Research, losses from online payment fraud could exceed $362 billion worldwide by 2028. The surge in fraudulent real-time payments is credible, driving a new focus on high-risk areas such as transactional payment fraud, identity theft and synthetic identity fraud.
Regulatory pressures are rising in step, and financial providers must be wary of patchwork solutions or outdated identity verification tools that leave critical security gaps. The key to fighting the escalating threat of fraud lies in embracing data-driven, real-time identity verification that can link verified contact data, such as precise address matching, with advanced capabilities like geolocation, document authentication and liveness checks.
Compliance can be daunting. By focusing on verified, high-quality contact data as the foundation, financial institutions can build systems that not only meet regulatory requirements but also inspire trust.
All it takes is great data and tools that bridge the gap between basic data checks and real-world assurance. With data quality first, compliance efforts are based on the solid ground of true, verified connections.
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