Scaling and automating KYB online research

Scaling and automating KYB online research

Author:
John Canfield
October 22, 2023
0 min read

Rising regulation and adversarial threats are pressuring risk and compliance teams to control costs and increase quality. One big opportunity is automating online research for Know Your Business (KYB) which today is largely done manually. When done well, automation saves costs while delivering deep and rigorous due diligence that can be plugged into other automated processes throughout the customer lifecycle. 

The core technology now exists to automate and scale online research. Here is BlueArc’s approach:

1) Finding sources and assessing their reputation

There are millions of information sources about businesses. In addition to official news sources and third party databases, there are business partners, customers, employees, investors, and influencers that can tell us a lot. But some sources are more reliable than others. We believe that massively expanding the range of sources is only possible by also performing an assessment of each source. How well established is it, how much does it promote trustworthiness, does it have an independent voice, or is it posting unfiltered paid content?  

2) Building a verified story about the business

Using AI, we then extract the key facts about the business from each source. We find supporting and contradicting information and weigh it by the source’s assessed reliability. These facts then build a story about the business. The richer and better-supported the story, the higher the confidence. Thin stories with no support or many contradictions have low confidence. 

3) Creating an all-new AI-powered risk infrastructure

Scaling the quantity of business data, the variety of sources and the rigor of analysis requires a new kind of risk system, very different from what currently exists. That’s why we are building new risk infrastructure to scale across millions of interrelated entities and sources, each with their own reputation assessment. That’s why we are building infra from the start to leverage AI and synthesize multiple views of the same entity. 

4) Supporting decisioning and oversight

To support decisioning at multiple touchpoints (onboarding, due diligence, transaction monitoring, and customer interactions) we support risk profiles at multiple levels – scores, written summaries and granular data. Automation enables better consistency of decisioning, justification for each decision, and oversight over decisioning changes. 

We are excited to be building new risk systems that automate online research, scale up the breadth of data sources, and synthesize a coherent risk profile useful throughout the customer lifecycle. If you want to save cost and avoid risks with better online research, please contact us.