If your company engages in global trade, you know that you have no choice but to screen every party to an export transaction. Government agencies require you to “know your customer”— as well as the banks, carriers and freight forwarders in your logistics ecosystem. However, restricted party screening applies more broadly than just when moving goods internationally; companies should also be concerned about parties in their operational and financial transactions.
Whenever there is an exchange of goods, services, data or currency, it is important to screen every transaction for any actors directly or indirectly associated with individuals, entities or locations on any restricted, denied or sanctioned party list.
This is a mouthful, but it is a critical component for sound corporate governance.
Screening Prospects, Customers and Business Partners
Business relationships can have unseen risks that could jeopardize your company’s reputation and lead to heavy fines or even imprisonment. Restricted party screening (sometimes referred to as denied party screening) is an essential aspect of due diligence, extending beyond just your global trade transactions to screen all prospective business partners or customers against government-issued denied and sanctioned party lists. The process should include the entire directory of employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, transactions and records on an ongoing basis.
In the current business environment of fast-paced operations and large volumes of customers, screening one’s customer-base manually for restricted parties is a daunting and often impossible task. Manual screenings are challenging for a variety of reasons. Above all, they are incredibly labor-intensive, subject to interpretation and errors, resulting in high false positives. Worse yet, manual screening can fail to identify real threats, leaving you and your company open to increased risk. Restricted party screening lists may include hundreds of thousands of entities at any given time. Combine that with spelling variations, different languages and alphabets, and there could be billions of possible search criteria and combinations. These complexities require advanced software or workflow processes to be in place; there is no feasible way for companies to screen against these lists adequately with spreadsheets.
e2open automates the manually intensive screening process to check whether a trading partner is on any official denied persons or illegal trans-shipper list. e2open also searches parties against notable lists compiled by Dow Jones, including the Sanctions Ownership Research, State-Owned Companies, Embargoed Embassy or Adverse Media Entity lists, adding a layer of reputational risk management as well.
Getting to the Data You Need
Unlike trade transaction data, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, the world’s most common CRM, typically store customer and vendor information. Companies that use Salesforce store detailed customer data within it—the same records that must be screened to ensure that every party to every transaction is legally permitted. Since the CRM itself cannot do this, personnel must screen these records manually.
e2open uses Salesforce as a system of record for prospects, customers and vendors for its internal operations. Realizing the importance of due diligence, we use our restricted party screening tools to scrub and maintain our CRM database using automation. e2open’s Salesforce connector provides integration and related services to automatically screen records against the world’s most comprehensive database of restricted parties. With the connector working between the two systems, it is fast and easy to begin screening with very little IT intervention. Integration takes a matter of a few days, not weeks.
With this bridge in place between Salesforce and e2open’s market-leading restricted party content, new accounts, contacts and prospects are quickly and automatically screened for compliance concerns, receiving results directly back into Salesforce records. Every time a name or address changes, the system re-screens the record; this way, contact occurs with pre-screened records only. In addition, an on-hold status is placed on all flagged records before allowing further contact with any of the individuals associated with that account.
When potential matches or hits occur, highly configurable workflow features allow users to resolve them efficiently using routing, alerts and escalations. With these alerts, users can determine which hits to manually resolve before proceeding with any activities. Since teams are not spending time researching numerous matches, they can focus on clearing holds and other business-critical tasks.
Safeguard Your Company
Organizations need to have extra layers of security in today’s increasingly risky environment. By leveraging restricted party screening capabilities and the ability to access CRM data across all functional areas of the enterprise, all trading partners—including individual contacts and parent and subsidiary companies—can be appropriately vetted. Simple, easy integration and a proven system is the key for improved corporate governance.
To Learn More about restricted party screening and the Salesforce connector, download the solution brief here.
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