Identity Resolution Daily

Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior VP

I confess. I have ‘borrowed’ some product and sales messages from people outside of the company from time to time. But, in fairness, these people are usually recognized industry experts. Take Ken Rijock, for example. Mr. Rijock is a former banking attorney at an international law firm. He’s also a former money launderer. He spent the 1980s as a money launderer and adviser to drug traffickers until he was arrested and served a U.S. federal prison sentence for racketeering and money laundering. I recently re-read several installments of his Confessions of a Money Launderer series, which outlines a serialized account of his escapades while on the other side of the law.

We previously posted about Mr. Rijock’s writings back in October of 2007, but the information seems just as relevant today as it did back then. The issue of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) continues to be front and center for the global financial services industry, and as a group we continue to learn new and innovative ways to solve the problem.

To that end, the American Bankers Association (ABA) holds its annual Anti Money Laundering Conference in Washington, DC, next week. Beginning Sunday, November 13th, the conference runs through Tuesday the 15th and looks to be very well attended once again. The conference is a great venue for BSA/AML compliance officers, in-house and outside counsel, fraud officers and investigators, bank auditors, regulatory officials and consultants. According to the ABA, this conference reflects “must have” content for BSA/AML compliance professionals.  It’s hard to argue that statement, given the robust agenda that has been put together.

The lineup of speakers this year includes the ABA president Mr. Frank Keating and the director of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Mr. James Freis. Additionally, a solid lineup of key industry players are involved in the sponsorship of this year’s event, including Infoglide Software Corp., LexisNexis, NICE Actimize, Palantir Technologies, and World-Check (home of the Confessions of a Money Launderer series).  Infoglide, who hosts this industry blog site, will be at Booth 407 exhibiting their industry-leading Identity Resolution Engine (IRE) product for Fraud and AML detection/investigation.  Please come by and visit us, because I truly believe that we have ‘borrowed’ all of the right pieces from industry experts to make our technology a viable solution for the banking and financial services industry.

There.  I’m glad I got that off my chest.

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by Douglas Wood, Infoglide Senior VP

On the heels of recent news that the Infoglide-powered TSA ‘Secure Flight’ program has received a 2011 Technology Innovation Award from Government Computer News comes word that FICO, the leading provider of analytics and decision management technology, has announced that it is enhancing its risk management and fraud detection applications by incorporating Infoglide’s market-leading Identity Resolution Engine® (IRE) software. Infoglide’s IRE will serve as the identity resolution engine and link analysis solution across FICO’s suite of fraud detection and risk management products, which include the industry-leading FICO™ Falcon® Fraud Manager for credit grantors and FICO™ Insurance Fraud Manager.

More:  See the announcement here.

Having worked with the leadership team at FICO now for many months, I can attest to their deep underlying commitment to bring only the best analytic capabilities to market. With the tight integration of Infoglide and FICO products, fraud investigators can identify customers with greater precision, and use link analysis to find connections between transactions, people, third parties and discrete fraud events that can reveal previously hidden fraud schemes. The combined capabilities expand the view of the fraud investigator and enable the identification fo more complicated fraud patterns, criminal fraud rings, and networks of collusive participants that might otherwise appear disconnected from the fraud problem.

Infoglide is thrilled to be teaming with an undisputed market leader, and we are already working diligently with their product team(s). FICO will first focus on integrating Infoglide’s capabilities with FICO Falcon Fraud Manager and FICO Insurance Fraud Manager, in order to enable the many users of these solutions to drive more effective fraud investigations and prevent the most complex fraud schemes, often involving multiple individuals and organizations.

As part of the partnership commitment by both parties, Infoglide will be attending FICO World in New York City from November 1 – 5.   I hope to see you there!

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By Mike Betron

Infoglide VP and GM of Social Identity Services

In the hit television series 24, Jack Bauer needed accurate information for split second decisions in “real time.” It was a matter of life or death for the characters in the show - even subtle discrepancies could mean the difference between Bauer trusting someone or deciding that he or she was a terrorist. Knowing the facts - in their most current status - was imperative for him to function. On the show, Bauer could rely on Chloe, his contact at the Counter Terrorist Unit to give him the latest assessment of the situation so he could decide on his next course of action.

For most financial institutions, however, finding a person of interest is not as simple as dialing up Chloe. In a recent survey commissioned by Infoglide to 230 managers, directors, and VPs in charge of managing fraud/risk/security at the top 100 banks in the US,  over a 1/3 of all participants responded that their most critical challenge to solving fraud was their inability to effectively find persons of interest in real time across all of their data. Oftentimes, even when a bank has usable information, they can’t put the pieces together in time to solve the puzzle.

Part of the issue lies in the massive quantities of data that financial institutions have to search through. According to our survey, the average investigator at a bank searched four different systems, with many of the larger banks needing to search over 7 data sets or systems.  

Another issue identified in the survey is the lack of data sharing between departments. For example, less than half of all banks even share a common case management tool across their departments.  Collaborative efforts are either manual or nonexistent for over 50% of all banks. John Doe might be defrauding the commercial side of the bank and laundering his newfound wealth, but the bank is not be able to pinpoint that it is the same person. Where is Chloe when you need her?

Banks that suffer these issues should strongly consider Infoglide Identity Resolution Engine (IRE). With IRE, they can connect to all of their data sources – internal and third party - to search for persons of interest in real time.

The stakes may not be life or death, but with banks under increasing regulatory and compliance pressures, there exists the same Bauer-esque need to make good decisions in real time about the interactions they have with customers.  Missed opportunities to stop fraud and/or money laundering are costly and painful.  Sorry, Chloe… but IRE has your job now.  It provides the real time intelligence, real time threat detection and real time decisions that you used to give to Jack… 24 hours a day.

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By Michael Shultz - Infoglide CEO

Infoglide Software Corporation would like to congratulate their TSA Secure Flight program team in Annapolis Junction, MD, as one of the ten projects chosen for Government Computer News (GCN) “Outstanding 2011 IT Achievement in Government.” As regular readers of this blog know, Infoglide’s identity resolution technology sits as the core risk engine of the Secure Flight program.

According to GCN.com, “The teams behind the winning projects, chosen from a list of more than 200 nominated, share a commitment to drive down costs and displayed the leadership and engineering skills needed to put the power of some of the worlds biggest computer facilities into the hands of individual citizens and professional end users.”

An article on GCN.com explains the program thusly:  “After Sept. 11, 2001, when airlines failed to coordinate a successful watch list system on their own, the 911 Commission recommended TSA take on the challenge. With the Secure Flight Program, TSA put its IT brain trust up against the daily threat of deadly force. The challenges were unprecedented: perform real-time matching for all flights, including reservations made in advance and at the last minute, while permitting airlines to submit data up to 72 hours before departure. Secure Flight set up new processes, data exchanges, applications, IT hardware and infrastructure, and established support systems for a consistent watch-list matching process. The management and technical ingenuity behind the project has stood the test of time for 10 years.”

A leading provider of entity analytics software for critical cross-database ‘Search / Match / Link’ applications, Infoglide Software provides technology that allows single-request searching into multiple databases without the need to move or clean data.  With a best-in-class library of over 50 algorithms accounting for variations in names, addresses, dates and other attributes, the technology points to who’s who… and who knows whom… despite data quality problems and/or deliberate attempts to deceive. 

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By Douglas Wood, Infoglide SVP of Sales and Services

I noted with interest the August 31 announcement that IBM is buying UK based i2 Inc.  I was in my hotel room when I read the announcement, attending the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI) conference in Charlotte.  I was actually so surprised that I dropped one of my shoes onto the floor as I was hurrying out of the hotel room.

Perhaps I should not have been so shocked, though.  It was clear to me that the 2009 COPLINK/i2 ‘merger’ never quite developed the way either party had intended, and that neither entity was working particularly well with the other. Looks like IBM saw the same thing and swooped in to put the pieces together.  Good play on their part.

With loads of customers in several countries, i2 is a large provider of intelligence analytics for crime and fraud prevention serving the banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail markets.  I suspect that IBM’s plans will include integrating the i2 and COPLINK platforms into the overall Infosphere portfolio, particularly the Identity Insights solution formerly known as Entity Analytics Solution (EAS).  With a new base of customers in which to up-sell software and services, IBM looks well positioned to take on SAS and other behemoth players in the fraud analytics business.  Or are they?

I don’t expect SAS to sit on its hands.  They never do.  Although more traditionally thought of as a NIH shop, I would expect some rapid bulking up on their part.  And what of HP?  The acquisition of Autonomy was interesting to say the least.  I find it hard to believe they are going to stop there.  Even BAE Systems is ready with their recent purchase of Detica/Norkom and the Netreveal platform.

In the meantime, startups such as Palantir Technologies and Infoglide Software continue to make major strides in building our respective next-gen technologies and customer bases. I am particularly proud of our Identity Resolution Engine product and MinorMonitor offerings.  The former provides cross database single-request fuzzy searching, social link discovery, anonymous resolution for data privacy and real time red flag analytics for commercial and government clients.  MinorMonitor is our free web tool that – using the same core technology used to keep terrorists off of airplanes - alerts parents on what their children are being exposed to on Facebook.

The possibilities are endless heading into the fourth quarter.  What’s going to happen next?  I’m not sure.  I expect that other shoe to drop sooner rather than later, though.

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The International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators (IAFCI) annual conference begins next week in Charlotte, NC.  The association, a non-profit international organization, provides an environment within which information about financial fraud, fraud investigation and fraud prevention methods can be collected, exchanged and taught for the common good of the industry.  Infoglide Software Corporation is a proud sponsor of IAFCI and will be attending this year’s event.  We invite all of our friends  - and future customers - to come visit us at Booth 105. We would love to see you there.  The conference begins on Monday, August 29th and runs through Thursday, September 2nd at the Charlotte Convention Center.

IAFCI has members across the world in every major continent, broken down by about one third law enforcement, one third banking and one third retail and service members.  The membership dovetails nicely with Infoglide’s customer base.  With a presence in major retail organizations, top global banks and mission critical government agencies, it is evident that Infoglide’s Identity Resolution Engine (IRE) is a tool that financial crimes investigators are excited about.

If you’re in the business of detecting and investigating financial crimes, AML and fraud, you know what it’s like to perform endless searches into disparate data sources looking for that golden nugget of information.  It’s worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack.  In fact, the needle itself is usually spread across  several haystacks.  Fortunately, Infoglide’s  patented IRE software helps  financial crimes investigators quickly identify ‘persons of interest’ within those haystacks of data.  Here’s how:

1. Enterprise-wide Identity Resolution: allows single-request searching into multiple databases without the need to move or clean the data.  Accounting for variations in names, addresses and other attributes, it eliminates time and effort in triaging fraud cases, and allows analysts to focus on the high-return cases.
2. Social Link Discovery: looks at non-obvious relationships between individuals across databases.  By understanding, for example, that a loan applicant shares an address with the loans officer, and also shares a telephone number with a known fraudster, a company can gain immediate insight into the risks associated with that transaction.
3. Anonymous Resolution for data Privacy: allows organizations to productively search into restricted databases without violating international data privacy laws.  The analyst can understand if a match was ‘likely’ found in the restricted data, without ever seeing or retrieving the actual results.
4. Real Time Read Flag Analysis: is the proactive implementation of the technology that looks at incoming transaction and compares them to internal and third party databases to understand possible identity matches and non obvious relationships.  If one is found, the software triggers an instant alert.

So, if you or someone you know is heading to the conference, please stop by to meet us.  It’s possible those haystacks aren’t quite as intimidating as you thought.

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By Mike Betron - Infoglide Director of Marketing

Today, Infoglide launched a new product called MinorMonitor. MinorMonitor is a free tool that allows parents to protect their minor children on Facebook by identifying and alerting them to dangerous activities and suspicious friends. The system automatically notifies parents when it identifies anything that appears to be cyber-bullying, solicitation, drug use, and more.  If you have a child that is active on Facebook, check out how you can protect them at www.minormonitor.com.

So, one might naturally wonder why the leader in identity resolution technology would make an online tool to help parents protect their kids. The answer is actually quite simple:  The very things that set Infoglide apart in the corporate fraud and risk mitigation industry, work equally as well in the social media monitoring world.  That is why, given all of the horrible things we all hear about cyber-bullying, suicides, and abductions that we felt a moral obligation to make something available for rightfully concerned parents.

Infoglide has long been the leader in developing sophisticated entity searching, matching, and linking technology that allows companies to find persons of interest across a wide variety of data types.  For our customers, this often means being able to find, match, or link similar people, places, or things for the purpose of reducing risk and fraud.  In the case of MinorMonitor, we adapted our patented technology to analyze Facebook data in order to discover potentially dangerous activities and friends online and alert parents to their existence.

So as it turns out, the technology typically used for mission critical applications where there is a potential for significant loss of money or lives is now being leveraged to power MinorMonitor. What the Department of Homeland Security uses to identify potential terrorists, you can now use to keep your kids safe on Facebook.   For a parent, no mission is more critical than that of protecting a child.  Is your child protected on Facebook?

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Over the past few months, Infoglide Software Corporation - the leading provider of identity resolution and entity analytics technology for fraud and investigations - commissioned a survey to discover the biggest technology challenges facing banks in preventing and investigating fraud.

The survey was conducted with US-based banking institutions having over $4BN in assets.  Of note is that 30% of the respondents had international operations outside of the US.  The respondents included VPs of Compliance and Risk Management, directors of AML, Risk Applications/Fraud Control and managers of Fraud Investigation, Security, BSA and Loss Prevention.

The results of the survey are currently being compiled for general release, but it was extremely interesting to learn that the key challenges of fraud investigations include:

1.       the inability to access data due to privacy concerns

2.       a lack of real-time high performance data searching engine

3.       and an inability to cross-reference and discover relationships between suspicious entities in different databases.  

For regular readers of this blog, it comes as no surprise that identity resolution and entity analytics technology provides a solution to those challenges.  An identity resolution engine glides across the different data within (or perhaps even external to) a bank’s infrastructure, delivering a view of possible identity matches and non-obvious relationships or hidden links between those identities… despite variations in attributes and/or deliberate attempts to deceive.

Large banks need to know who’s who… and who’s working with who.  A true identity resolution engine is the right way for them to find out.

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We’ll start posting again next week.  For now, we want to wish all the friends of IdentityResolutionDaily a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!

The Infoglide Software Team

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By the Infoglide Team

tdwi: Informatica Ups the MDM Stakes

“Until now, Informatica’s MDM strategy has largely been peripheral. It had most of the tools (e.g., data integration, data quality, data profiling, and identity resolution) but tended to partner with bigger or best-of-breed players to promote MDM-oriented offerings or services… What’s risky about the acquisition of Siperian is that it imperils Informatica’s existing MDM partnerships (especially with Oracle Corp.) and compromises its neutrality pitch.”

GCN: Fusion centers to be assessed

“Fusion centers will conduct self-assessments, followed by a gap analysis and peer reviews, according to officials at the National Fusion Center Association, a new not-for-profit organization based in Alexandria, Va., that represents the 72 fusion centers. The assessments are meant to determine their progress in reaching baseline capabilities. Those capabilities were created by a federal advisory committee that also wrote the original guidelines for those centers.”

WorkersCompensation.com: NYSIF Announces 154 Arrests

“Recent significant cases resulting in millions of dollars in savings to NYSIF have included claimants who receive benefits while operating businesses or remain employed in other capacities, the most prevalent type of workers’ comp. fraud. Other cases involve premium fraud, the most costly type, in construction, asbestos abatement and other contracting, including investigations in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Labor, the U.S. Postal Inspector, and local labor racketeering bureaus. Still other cases involve fraudulent provider billing.”

SignalScape: Experts Ponder Both Sides of Border Security

“The DHS has also tested mobile identification systems and created an information sharing plan with the Department of Justice which allows officials to search for criminal records. Art Macius, chief of staff at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) added that organizations such as his and the DHS must also share information with their international counterparts. This international cooperation includes efforts such as cargo screening for commercial aircraft though efforts such as the Secure Flight program. Macius said that by this spring, the program will work with U.S. airlines to screen baggage and air cargo, and that the coverage will extend to international carriers by the end of the year.”

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