Equifax Inc., a credit information company, on Monday announced the upcoming India debut of its proprietary international database, ‘CDC Alert’, which lists people who have been involved in white-collar crime such as money laundering, financial frauds and terrorism-related activities in India and around the globe.
The Equifax product will offer Indian companies comprehensive information on the financial and law compliance track-record of customers and collaborators, along with their source of funds.
As part of the stringent KYC (know your customer) process, Equifax will help corporates, banks, insurance companies, financial intermediaries, etc., to run effective compliance checks on their prospective customers. Equifax is confident that customers of ?CDC Alert? will now be able to assess risks better, minimize their exposures and losses, and also assist with regulatory processes.
“The value ?CDC Alert? brings to the Indian market is the international nature of the lists it maintains, as well as the updates that take place on a real-time basis,” says Shahid Charania, Managing Director for Emerging Markets, Equifax.
To prepare the negative list, ?CDC Alert? collates data from multiple sources of information including key global government-backed investigative agencies, regulators, banks, the Interpol, and media reports.
To make the product more robust for the Indian market, hundreds of India-specific publications are already being screened and monitored on a daily basis for negative news pertaining to financial fraud and money laundering.
The product?s flexible architecture also allows users to customize their services and the sophisticated search-and-matching logic eliminates unwanted matches.
In addition to automating and streamlining compliance efforts, additional benefits of ?CDC Alert? include a marked improvement in productivity and allocation of resources that eliminates lengthy, manual searches of multiple databases. The product not only efficiently facilitates due diligence efforts through compliance, but also seamlessly integrates into business with no additional technology resources.
