More anti-money-laundering software

In an effort to comply with the “Know Your Customer” provision of the USA Patriot Act, Semagix has developed the Customer Identification & Risk Assessment Solution (CIRAS). The provision requires financial institutions to “reasonably and practicably” know their customers.

Semagix says it CIRAS technology goes beyond verifying the identity of the customer and extends or enhances information about a customer to include key relationships held by that customer, the sources and destinations of specific transactions and the risk represented by each of these factors. CIRAS uses semantic metadata techniques, the company says, to infer relationships across huge volumes of information that can come from a wide variety of sources including internal CRM applications, external watch lists or Web pages. The company claims that because of its metadata approach, Semagix's CIRAS solution is able to scale to massive volumes of data and sources and actually speed up decision and transaction processes.

Further, says Semagix, CIRAS lowers content procurement costs and allows companies to focus resources on higher priority queries through a process it calls “information triage.” Similar to how a hospital accepts and prioritizes incoming patients, CIRAS is said to develop a risk profile by first conducting an initial check to determine if a company or individual should be considered and then engaging in deeper due diligence on all risk factors for a query.