Transaction banking platform iGTB has unveiled an “artificial-intelligence-empowered” KYC solution called Sanctions Screening at Sibos in Singapore.

The solution, which has been designed with financial compliance in mind, incorporates a natural-language contextual search of social media to construct a broader and more accurate view, which the company says goes beyond current KYC methods.

“With KYC a primary concern, yet current list-based screening deemed insufficient by regulators, banks must scan search engines, social media and other unstructured and un-auditable sources if they are to accurately identify high-risk clients… In one example, 6% of a bank’s supposedly ‘clean’ names were discovered to be high risk,” reads a statement from the company. “iGTB’s new solution, now live, leverages machine learning, artificial intelligence and other state-of-the-art technologies to help protect banks from commercial risk.”

At a Sibos briefing on October 13, Tapan Agarwal, head of strategic initiatives and product council head for risk management at iGTB, told the audience and GTR that a large US bank has already shown interest in adopting the solution, which, he said “will save banks enormous amounts of time when doing due diligence, KYC and supplier onboarding”. He further noted that while there is some belief that conducting “Google KYC” is better than banks’ KYC, the false positives that this produces can be excessively time-consuming. iGTB’s product “cuts out all the noise”, he explained.