AML source and monitoring settings

Just like in any other field of life, fraud also has certain universal tendencies and trends you need to be aware of to protect your business. However, fraud prevention can get much more specific, depending on your local jurisdiction and risk levels. In addition to providing the broadest data coverage possible and ensuring that compliance demands are met, SEON also enables you to personalize AML source and monitoring settings so you can finetune AML screening to your unique needs.
 

By default, all source types are enabled and updated on every database change. This is definitely the most thorough and safe option. However, depending on your vertical and your own risk assessment preferences, you might not find all sources relevant to your business. 

By disabling monitoring for certain lists or making the updates less frequent, you can save compliance officers time and effort by reducing the amount of data they need to go through on a regular basis. 

Customize your AML screening by selecting which of the four main source types – PEP, Sanctions, Watchlists, Crime Lists and Adverse Media – you want the AML API to check.

PEP (Politically Exposed Person): A PEP is an individual who holds or has held a prominent public role, such as a government official or executive in a state-owned enterprise, which may expose them to higher risks of corruption or bribery. Screening against PEP lists helps identify individuals who may require enhanced due diligence.

Sanctions: Sanctions lists include individuals, organizations and entities restricted by international or national authorities (e.g., OFAC, UN, EU) from engaging in certain financial activities. These restrictions are often based on threats to national security, involvement in terrorism, or other illegal activities. Screening for sanctions ensures compliance with legal requirements and prevents dealing with restricted parties.

Watchlists: Watchlists contain individuals and entities identified as potentially high-risk by various organizations but who may not meet the criteria for formal sanctions. These lists help flag individuals or entities who may be involved in suspicious activities, such as organized crime or potential fraud.

Crime Lists: Crime lists detail individuals or entities with documented criminal backgrounds, focusing on financial crimes or activities associated with money laundering, fraud, tax evasion or corruption. Within the crime lists, you can further filter by specific crime subcategories based on the FATF (Financial Action Task Force) classifications, allowing you to only target the crime types most relevant to your compliance requirements.

Adverse Media: Adverse media lists gather publicly available negative news or reports about individuals or entities. These sources highlight potential reputational risks and emerging issues that might not yet be captured on formal crime or sanctions lists.

To configure these settings:

1. From the Admin panel, go to the Settings page and select the AML tab.
2. Here, you can update system-level settings, using toggles to enable or disable checks for each source type.
    

You can select crime subcategories you wish to include in the filter. Only crimes within these selected categories will appear in your results. If none are selected, we will ignore these fields, meaning no crime types will be filtered out. 

The FATF crime filter includes the following categories:

• Illicit Drug Trafficking: Crimes related to the illegal trade, manufacturing, and distribution of controlled substances.
• Terrorist Crime: Offenses involving the financing, support, or execution of terrorist activities.
• Environmental Crime: Crimes against the environment, including illegal pollution, waste disposal, and wildlife trafficking.
• Murder or Inflicting Physical Harm: Violent crimes resulting in death or physical injury to individuals.
• Fraud: Deceptive practices designed to secure unfair or unlawful financial gain, including identity theft, cyber fraud, and financial misrepresentation.
• Robbery: Theft involving the use or threat of force, including armed and violent robberies.
• Kidnapping: Crimes involving the unlawful abduction or detention of individuals, often for ransom.
• Theft: General acts of stealing or unlawfully taking property.
  Illicit Weapon Possession: Crimes related to the unauthorized possession, trafficking or use of weapons.
• Sexual Offenses: Crimes of a sexual nature, including sexual assault and exploitation.
• Harassment: Repeated and unwanted conduct causing alarm or distress, including cyber harassment and stalking.
• Smuggling: The illegal transport of goods, people or substances across borders, often to evade legal controls.
• Counterfeit Currency: Crimes involving the creation, possession or distribution of fake currency.
• Counterfeiting: Crimes related to the production or distribution of fraudulent goods, documents or currency.
• Organized Crime: Activities associated with criminal organizations involved in multiple illicit activities.
• Corruption: Acts of bribery, embezzlement and the abuse of power for personal or financial gain.
• Non-FATF Minor Crimes: Minor offenses that are not categorized by FATF but may still be relevant in certain AML contexts.
• Human Trafficking: Crimes involving the exploitation of individuals through coercion, force or deception for labor or sexual purposes.
• Tax Crime: Crimes related to tax evasion, tax fraud and related offenses.
  Market Manipulation: Financial crimes aimed at interfering with the fair operation of financial markets, such as insider trading and securities fraud.
• Other: This category represents cases where the crime type data may not align with the predefined FATF categories or where the data is unavailable. To ensure potentially high-risk cases are not unintentionally filtered out due to missing category data, it’s recommended to keep "Other" selected.

Example Configuration Scenarios

Terrorism-focused compliance: An organization may select only Terrorist Crime, Illicit Weapon Possession, Counterfeit Currency and Organized Crime to focus on cases specifically associated with terrorism financing.

Anti-fraud focus: Entities prioritizing anti-fraud should select Fraud, Market Manipulation and Tax Crime to monitor activities that may indicate fraudulent financial behaviors.
 

When enabled, you can also select how often we should check the names you have enabled AML monitoring for from the dropdowns on the AML tab of the Settings page. You can opt for updates on every database change or on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, biannual and annual basis. 

We believe in fair and transparent pricing. We charge based on the number of individuals you want to carry out background checks on, not the actual calls or monitoring events. This means if you want to have daily monitoring but also wish to perform out-of-order checks via single API calls, we won't charge you again as long as you assure us that it is the same person. You only pay once per individual per year, allowing you to re-check a user as many times as needed without incurring extra costs.

We maintain consistent pricing for monitoring and single calls. Whether monitoring takes place through our monitoring solution or via a new API call with identical search details, you won't face any surprise fees.

The annual subscription automatically renews if monitoring is set to ‘true’ and isn’t turned off from the interface. To avoid unwanted billing, turn off monitoring by resending the name with monitoring set to ‘false’ or turning it off from the interface.

To ensure you're charged annually only once for the same individual, certain details must match. 
These details include: user_id, user_fullname, user_firstname, user_middlename, user_lastname, user_dob, user_pob, and user_photoid_number.

Adverse media and monitoring

In addition to person search (available via API, the SEON dashboard or the batch tester) and entity search (only available via API), you can customize your AML name search with optional features like adverse media search and monitoring for an additional fee.

Enjoy the option to set up monitoring for every search you conduct automatically. No additional charges for monitoring - it's included in your subscription.