Automating Financial Confidence

The Anti-Fraud Way of the Future

Compliance requirements for financial institutions are ever-evolving. In particular, KYC – or “Know Your Client” standards – presents challenges to even the most rigorously vigilant of banks and businesses. In October 2022, Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed Wells Fargo for an alleged failure to protect customers from financial fraud and related scams on digital payment platform Zelle, per reporting by Reuters.

Adapt to a new era for financial confidence.

“ Robust Know Your Customer (KYC) standards are a good starting point when onboarding digital assets customers. However, proactive screening and transaction monitoring should be in place through on-chain analytics solutions..” Arunkumar Krishnakumar, Coin Telegraph

The advent of technology – and accompanying new mediums for currency, such as crypto – has resulted in a need for greater savvy when it comes to the delicate intersection between finance and cybersecurity. In an article published in October 2022, Coin Telegraph’s Arunkumar Krishnakumar cautioned that as more and more financial institutions enter the digital currency space, they’ll require a robust new understanding of analytics in order to institute effective AML policies.

Part of the problem here is that we currently inhabit the age of the digital nomad. People have grown increasingly mobile over the last several years, both at work and for leisure purposes. However, they still need to access their bank accounts, regardless of where in the world they’ve wandered off to. And while most banks based in fully developed countries have automated their KYC process for IP-based geolocation metadata, they face challenges when dealing with KYC in countries where physical addresses are easy to obfuscate.

What happens, for example, when someone attempts to access an account while living in an area with unmarked streets, or a rural part of an underdeveloped country?

Enter Aurora AddScore. A geodata service specific to Sovereign’s groundbreaking Aurora AI system, AddScore’s purpose is elegantly simple: the service provides confidence scores for financial institutions regarding a client’s provided address. It’s a simple, easy way to verify customer locations, based on a holistic look at the activity history of the associated device.

Expand your sphere of business with peace of mind.

The ability to verify addresses may seem relatively straightforward, but it can go a long way toward saving financial institutions major headaches in the long run. AddScore ensures that financial transactions, tax returns, and even online application forms for businesses come from verified locations. Ultimately, AddScore fortifies the confidence of financial institutions in the locations of otherwise difficult-to-verify customers, and represents an untapped opportunity to reach the unbanked.

Moreover, AddScore also provides confidence scores for IP addresses. Aurora’s capabilities allow AddScore to determine whether or not a specific IP address has been associated with illicit or otherwise adversely noteworthy activity in the past. This paints a more detailed overall portrait of requests that come in to banks for account access – and can go a long way toward preventing the kind of widespread scams that result in unhappy customers, reputational damage, and compromised financial integrity for banks.