By Andrei Skvarsky.
Business data provider Accuity, part of Anglo-Dutch publisher Reed Elsevier, is launching a unique risk assessment tool tailored for the Russian banking sector – a database to enable banks to screen potential customers from among politically exposed persons (PEPs) more efficiently than its predecessors.
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The database, whose main purpose is to help Russia fight corruption, is the first-ever PEP screening software device to contain names in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. It offers extensive data on current and former politicians and officials at every tier of government.
One novelty are profiles of local PEPs.
“Typically our PEP data has focused on international, national and state/provincial PEPs but not really on local PEPs as most countries were not concerned with local PEPs within other countries. Russia, however, must screen for all domestic PEPs, so we have focused on expanding that database to include those individuals,” Micah Willbrand, the London-based director of risk and payments for Europe, the Middle and Africa at the Illinois-headquartered company, told EmergingMarkets.me.
The system appears to take good care to prevent misidentifications.
“We want to get as many non-name data points as possible,” Willbrand said. “Be it dates of birth, country of origin or residence, passport numbers, IDs’ numbers, etc., to help separate out real PEPs from false PEPs. For example, Vladimir Putin born in 1986 in Kiev is much different from Vladimir Putin born in 1952 in St. Petersburg. These data points help us automatically screen out the false hits.”
The system is split into categories.
Of more than two million profiles in the database only about one million are those of PEPs, making up the main category. The rest of the individuals who are profiled either have indirect political exposure or there is insufficient information about them.
There is a micro-category that includes people who have left public office but are likely to retain contacts in government.
In a separate category, the database contains profiles of companies as a well as individuals.
The system is based on public sources of information, including the media. The database discloses them, enabling a researcher to use a relevant source. “If you are in Russia, you may not care about a Brazilian data file [and] you may only care about individuals who appear in Russian and Eastern European databases,” Willbrand says.
“What we are trying to do is provide simple tools for businesses to quickly and easily screen and research their customer base so they can optimise the revenue generated by the customers,” he says.
At the moment only the people’s names are in Cyrillic characters and the rest of the profile information is in English or in Latin transliteration, but Willbrand says that eventually Cyrillic and Russian would be used for other data as well.
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