Clear Enhanced Due Diligence for Businesses: A Comprehensive Guide

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Clear due diligence is a crucial process for businesses, especially when expanding into new markets or entering into partnerships. Enhanced due diligence provides a more comprehensive approach to risk assessment and management.

Businesses can benefit from enhanced due diligence by identifying potential risks and opportunities early on, allowing them to make informed decisions about partnerships and investments. This process can also help build trust with stakeholders and improve a company's reputation.

The first step in enhanced due diligence is to conduct a thorough review of a company's financial records, including its balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. This information can help identify potential financial risks and opportunities for growth.

By conducting enhanced due diligence, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their partners and investments, reducing the risk of costly mistakes and increasing the potential for long-term success.

What is Enhanced Due Diligence?

Enhanced due diligence is a rigorous risk assessment process that goes beyond standard checks to prevent money laundering or terrorist financing. It's a comprehensive evaluation that helps companies understand who their customers or business partners are, and what their financial activities involve.

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This process is regulated in the financial and legal industries, and is essential for institutions to implement internal controls that prevent fraud. By performing enhanced due diligence, companies can be sure they're not building relationships with money launderers or terrorist financiers.

Enhanced due diligence involves a detailed risk assessment that answers key questions, including: Who is this customer or business? Who is linked to this customer or business? Who ultimately benefits from the financial activities of this customer or business? Are there any red flags associated with the customer or business?

Here are some of the key questions that enhanced due diligence helps to answer:

  • Who is this customer or business?
  • Who is linked to this customer or business?
  • Who ultimately benefits from the financial activities of this customer or business?
  • Are there any red flags associated with the customer or business?

By performing enhanced due diligence, companies can identify potential risks and take steps to mitigate them, ultimately protecting their reputation and finances.

Benefits and Importance

Clear enhanced due diligence is a crucial process that offers numerous benefits. It helps prevent financial crimes, such as money laundering and terrorist financing, by thoroughly investigating a company's or individual's background.

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By conducting a thorough investigation, clear enhanced due diligence can reduce the risk of financial loss due to fraud or other malicious activities. This is particularly important for businesses that operate in high-risk industries.

Clear enhanced due diligence also helps to maintain a positive reputation by ensuring that a company or individual is transparent and accountable.

Protect Business with Confidence

Protecting your business with confidence is crucial in today's financial landscape. Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) is the strictest form of customer or business due diligence, requiring identification checks, authentication of ownership, and transaction monitoring to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

Partnering with a trusted provider, such as Trustpair, can significantly upgrade your EDD process. Neotas, a trusted organization, has a global network of experts and analysts who can deliver timely and accurate intelligence in any jurisdiction.

To ensure the highest standards of quality, ethics, and confidentiality, it's essential to work with a reputable provider. Neotas adheres to these standards, providing businesses with confidence in their due diligence process.

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By implementing a robust EDD process, businesses can strengthen payment security and compliance, reducing the risk of PSD2 fraud. This requires ongoing monitoring and intelligence gathering to stay ahead of emerging threats.

Having a trusted partner, like Neotas, can provide businesses with the expertise and resources needed to stay compliant and secure.

Customers Hate It

Customers hate it, and it's no wonder why. Over 50% of customers who enter an EDD process churn.

Finding, redacting, scanning, and sending bank statements is a tedious and time-consuming process. It's a major turnoff for customers who just want to get things done.

Waiting days or even weeks for a decision is unacceptable. It's a huge loss to the business, especially when these customers are potentially your very best.

Core Elements and Process

An enhanced due diligence (EDD) investigation involves gathering comprehensive information about a subject, including their background, track record, and reputation. This information should be collected from experts who can provide a complete picture of the subject.

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To conduct an EDD investigation, you should review corporate records, including complex ownership structures, to confirm information presented and reveal any undisclosed beneficiaries or hidden interests. This involves a thorough examination of civil or criminal litigation, business disputes, and improper or illegal conduct.

The enhanced due diligence process begins with a culture of risk and monitoring, as recommended by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). This involves gathering the right information about customers or partner businesses to identify them, and verifying the source of funds held by them.

Here are the core elements of an enhanced due diligence process:

  • Customer or business information: comprehensive data collection including name, aliases, DOB or business commencement date, nationality or operating jurisdiction, address, and contact details
  • Nature of activity: detailed description of the purpose of the business, or the customer’s financial activities, such as type of project and industry
  • Source of funds: independently verify where the customer or business funds originated by following the paper trail and verifying any documents with additional checks to ensure they were not profits from crimes
  • Beneficial ownership: determine the owner and controller of a business through the UBO register, even where it may be opaque, to identify who ultimately benefits from the financial activities and ensure they are not associated with criminal groups

Ongoing monitoring is key to maintaining an enhanced due diligence status, as this enables a transparent and informative approach to maintaining customer or supplier relationships.

What Is the Process?

The core elements and process of enhanced due diligence are built on a foundation of risk and monitoring. This approach is recommended by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and helps financial institutions proactively identify potential issues.

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To begin the process, companies must gather the right information about their customers or partner businesses. This information is assessed using data from various external sources to confirm identities with confidence.

The process involves verifying the source of funds held by customers or partners. Two key factors to check are: matching the funds with the origin confirmed by a third party, and ensuring they are not proceeds of a crime.

In order to apply closer scrutiny, firms should independently verify the nature of all business relationships or the purposes of each transaction. This involves gathering comprehensive documentation to provide evidence of findings and meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Ongoing monitoring is crucial to maintaining an enhanced due diligence status. This enables a transparent and informative approach to maintaining customer or supplier relationships.

ClearStake: That Works

ClearStake was founded on a simple yet brilliant idea: EDD doesn't have to be complicated.

The traditional way of checking affordability using credit data and geo-affordability was flawed, and it's no longer an option.

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ClearStake resolves these challenges by providing real financial data from today forward, which is a game-changer in EDD.

This approach reduces analyst investigation time by a minimum of 25%, making the process more efficient.

With ClearStake, you can receive concise and accurate findings that focus on relevant red flags only, with zero false positives.

Core Elements of an Investigation

An enhanced due diligence (EDD) investigation should be conducted by experts who can provide a complete picture of a subject, including their backgrounds, source of funds, and more. This involves reviewing corporate records, seeking to confirm information presented and reveal any undisclosed beneficiaries or hidden interests.

To conduct a thorough EDD investigation, you should gather comprehensive data about the customer or business, including their name, aliases, date of birth or business commencement date, nationality or operating jurisdiction, address, and contact details. This information is essential for identifying the customer or business and verifying their identity.

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A thorough review of corporate records is also crucial, as it helps to confirm information presented and reveal any undisclosed beneficiaries or hidden interests. This includes a review of civil or criminal litigation or other regulatory or legal proceedings, which are often publicly available but not discoverable through standard screening searches.

The following are the core elements of an EDD investigation:

  • Background, track record, modus operandi, and reputation of the counterparty
  • Thorough review of corporate records
  • Details of civil or criminal litigation or other regulatory or legal proceedings
  • Details of any business disputes, or improper or illegal conduct
  • Any political exposure or relations with government officials, beyond that captured in PEP screening lists

To apply closer scrutiny, firms should independently verify the nature of all business relationships or the purposes of each transaction. This involves gathering comprehensive documentation to provide evidence of findings and meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Secure & Transparent

Maintaining control over your investigations is crucial, and our platform allows you to do just that.

With our secure and transparent approach, you can conduct due diligence without compromising your privacy or anonymity.

You have complete control over your data utilization, ensuring that your sensitive information remains safe.

This level of control is especially important when conducting investigations, where discretion is key.

Full Coverage: Adverse Media, PEPs, Sanctions, Watchlists

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We rapidly interrogate the largest traditional databases in the world, as well as 100% of public online data to ensure comprehensive risk profiling.

This means you can rest assured that we're leaving no stone unturned in our search for potential red flags.

We help you build a clear and concise individual risk profile by including adverse media, PEPs, sanctions, and watchlist screening.

This approach allows you to make informed decisions with confidence, knowing that you have a thorough understanding of the individual's risk profile.

By leveraging our extensive database access, you can quickly and easily identify potential issues and take proactive steps to mitigate them.

Our full coverage approach ensures that you're not only looking at traditional databases, but also public online data to get a complete picture of the individual's risk profile.

Industry and Regulatory Requirements

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) sets global standards for anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism, which must be adhered to by all countries.

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Regulatory bodies such as the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the UK's Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) enforce these standards by requiring due diligence and risk assessment procedures in place.

In the UK, the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 require businesses to verify the identity of their customers, monitor transactions, and report suspicious activity to the relevant authorities.

Industries Need This Type

If you're in the financial industry, you're likely no stranger to due diligence. Enhanced due diligence is a must for this highly regulated sector.

The financial industry is just one of several that require enhanced due diligence. Legal and real-estate industries also fall under this category.

Betting and gaming, including e-gaming and casinos, is another industry that demands enhanced due diligence. This is due to the high-risk nature of the business.

These industries have multiple variables that can lead to high-risk classification, making enhanced due diligence a crucial step in protecting your business.

Here are the industries that need enhanced due diligence:

  • Financial
  • Legal
  • Real-estate
  • Betting and gaming (including e-gaming and casinos)

How to Support AML Compliance

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Enhanced due diligence is a critical component of anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, providing a direct correlation between the two. It offers broader and more complex evidence-based verification of the identity, relationships, transactions, and red flags of any organization or customer.

Financial institutions, legal entities, accounting firms, and gaming or betting companies are required to follow enhanced due diligence procedures. This includes completing these procedures on high-risk customers, such as those located on watchlists or sanctions lists.

To support AML compliance, institutions must regularly screen the UBO register, watchlists, sanctions lists, and PEP lists. This is because these lists are ever-evolving, and customers or entities may not be forthcoming with changes in their information.

Automated, continuous B2B transaction monitoring can help with this requirement. Trustpair, for example, offers this type of monitoring, allowing compliance to happen in the background. When suspicious transactions, ID mismatches, or authentication issues occur, Trustpair automatically blocks business accounts from making payments to untrustworthy sources.

Here are some examples of the types of fraud that can be prevented with enhanced due diligence:

  • CEO fraud
  • Payment fraud
  • Wire transfer fraud
  • BEC (Business Email Compromise)

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the enhanced due diligence requirement?

Enhanced due diligence is a thorough risk assessment process that involves gathering additional information and conducting background checks to understand a customer's risk profile and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This process helps organizations identify and mitigate potential risks associated with their customers and transactions.

Ruben Quitzon

Lead Assigning Editor

Ruben Quitzon is a seasoned assigning editor with a keen eye for detail and a passion for storytelling. With a background in finance and journalism, Ruben has honed his expertise in covering complex topics with clarity and precision. Throughout his career, Ruben has assigned and edited articles on a wide range of topics, including the banking sectors of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

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