JP Morgan Chase Vastera, the leading provider of Global Trade Management (GTM) solutions, has announced the availability of the latest version of its risk management solution, TradeSphere Restricted Party Screening 3.0. Available on either a hosted, installed or fully outsourced basis, the new features of TradeSphere Restricted Party Screening bring greater protection to corporate supply chains as businesses aim to remain compliant with international trade and security laws.

Government laws and regulations prohibit the exchange of commodities, technical data or services with certain parties or entities that have been deemed irresponsible traders or a threat to national security or foreign policy interests.

JPMorgan Chase Vastera’s Restricted Party Screening solution helps companies protect their trade interests by providing screening technology and multi-list management designed to prevent illegal domestic and international transactions. Conducting business with a denied party can result in financial penalties, imprisonment, and the loss of a company’s trade privileges.

Among the new features of Restricted Party Screening 3.0 are:

  • Enhanced audit capability: To enhance corporate trade compliance, audit trails of all screening activity must be maintained. The industry standard has been to capture only the name and the date of screening decisions. Delivering a best practice approach, Restricted Party Screening 3.0 also captures the application ‘state’ at the time of each screening – lists being used for the screening and how the screening engine was tuned at the time of screening are also catalogued. The enhanced auditing capabilities also track data pertaining to when restricted party lists are modified, when tuning configurations have changed and who performed tuning adjustments.
  • Enhanced control: Restricted Party Screening solution users typically have little or no control over the algorithms that are at the heart of their screening engine. The new version provides users with the option of utilising JP Morgan Chase Vastera’s standard tuning configuration or managing their own unique tuning configuration to influence their level of manual review.
  • Increased security: In any compliance programme it is important to segregate duties by individual responsibility. The new version now segregates functionality by security role. Customers can easily control who has access to perform manual screening, make compliance decisions, or manage the screening configurations. This functionality allows for the appropriate segregation in duties and visibility required by SAS 70 and Sarbanes Oxley.
  • Expanded content: The application has been expanded to include more than 65 distinct entity lists from around the world. Examples of newly added content include lists from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, The FBI Seeking Information list, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Austrac), as well as the CIA’s Politically Exposed Person’s list. The multiple lists are consolidated into one central database that is kept updated as government lists change. More than 100,000 denied parties are included in the database.
  • Enhanced workflow: Customers now can create and customise their own work flow. Users can build an internal work queue to match any internal process flow for potential match resolution and internal escalation.
  • Enhanced visibility: Users can now access and view their screening data in virtually limitless ways as a new ad-hoc reporting tool enables users to retrieve data based on their own input values.

“Corporations are increasing focus on knowing their customers better. Maintaining a clean customer, vendor and supplier base is a vital component to perpetuating a strong, efficient supply chain,” says Bernie Hart, global product head, JPMorgan Chase Vastera. “Automated compliance screening should be the cornerstone of every supply chain operation. Preventing illegal transactions protects your trade interests and keeps your supply chain moving.”

In addition to being used to support business partner screening, TradeSphere Restricted Party Screening can be used by human resources departments to screen employees and job applicants; by on-site security personnel to screen office visitors; by corporate philanthropy departments to ensure that charitable gifts are not being distributed to the wrong parties; and by business development or mergers and acquisition specialists to ensure that acquisition targets have not committed prior trade violations.