Thomson Reuters are keeping the pressure up to dominate the KYC identity business. They have followed their recent takeover of Clarient and DTCC’s Avox with two new services helping banks/FIs and corporates be more certain that individuals and companies are actually who they say they are.

CLEAR ID Confirm

As part of their CLEAR online investigations suite, Thomson Reuters’s new CLEAR ID Confirm uses comprehensive, up-to-date public and proprietary data to enable organizations to verify an individual’s online identity, payee identity and customer identity. CLEAR ID Confirm provides the ability to:

• Verify initial identity information for accuracy
• Minimize potential for fraud and meet regulatory requirements
• Customize matching solutions to meet your needs
• Manage front-end risk by leveraging the most current and accurate data available to confirm identity

which is vital in anti-money laundering/know your customer (KYC) requirements and fraud mitigation.

How CLEAR ID Confirm works:

• Sorts large amounts of data to identify risk and perform essential due diligence
• Ranks and rates results to provide an easy-to-understand picture of the person in question
• Labels data sets to indicate Match, Partial Match, or No Match
• Identifies abnormalities with risk flags
• Creates a risk score based on your criteria
• Provides a recommendation to help make consistent decisions across your business.

Customisation and users

CLEAR ID Confirm users can access public records data through CLEAR, batch, or a tailored system-to-system integration. It can be further customised to meet an organization’s data verification needs, which may include detection of fraudulent identification credentials, assigning customized risk scores, flagging specific data, or even offering simple “yes/no” indicators to make consistent risk decisions.

CLEAR ID Confirm is already used by the banking/financial, insurance, retail/e-commerce and government sectors to enhance their ability to be sure that a person or organisation is who they say they are.

Thomson Reuters Authenticator app

Today, Thomson Reuters announced today the release of their Authenticator, a multi-factor authentication app (Apple and Android compatible) that provides user verification using at least two forms of identity, giving firms and their clients more protection against cyber threats. This provides embedded security controls that offer convenient and secure user authentication for firm staff and firm clients. When multi-factor authentication is enabled, users and their clients are granted access to data or an application only after presenting pieces of evidence from two or more of the following categories:

• Something you know (e.g., password)
• Something you have (e.g., phone)
• Something you are (e.g., fingerprint)

This is nothing new, it is just an essential part of knowing the customer.

---

CTMfile take: These latest developments in the KYC and ID business are important examples of the progress that that system and service suppliers and service providers are making, BUT will all these processes and checks be enough for your organisation to stop worrying whether the person or business, “Are actually who they say they are?”