Pre-KYC Screening for Banca Sella

About Banca Sella

Banca Sella is one of Italy’s Premier Banking Institutions. Being one of the top 20 largest banks in Italy, Banca Sella has over 400 branches scattered across the Italian Peninsula and Sicily. Ever since its founding in 1886, Banca Sella has been steadily growing and in the 1930s started expanding outside of its town of origin - Biella.

One of the key reasons behind Banca Sella’s continuous success is constant innovation and improvement in internal and customer-facing processes. Today, Banca Sella Group is a financial ecosystem consisting of banks, ECIs, and financial services companies - all sharing the passion for innovation and entrepreneurial DNA the founding family has been known for over the last 450 years.

The Challenge

Streamlining AML & KYC Operations while improving onboarding times.

While digitalization in the financial and banking industries has generated many opportunities for banks and their customers, it has also opened doors to new types of compliance risks and technological loopholes, leading to significant regulatory scrutiny.

This trend was further fueled by restrictions on movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the onboarding and account opening process conducted online, financial criminals could use stolen or falsified identity documents or sensitive information to manipulate the system and perform unlawful acts such as account takeovers, money laundering, terrorist financing, etc.

For Banca Sella, a banking institution that operates within a highly regulated industry with strict laws and regulations, ensuring full regulatory compliance has always been a must.

To facilitate the growth of its digital banking services, the bank was looking for ways to automate and enhance anti-money laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) controls in the account opening process, without jeopardizing strict abidance to regulations. That meant that Banca Sella needed a scalable way to flag questionable or false identities, complementing its existing AML & KYC processes and reducing the risk of various fraudulent activities as well as money laundering.

The Solution

Accurate Identity Verification with Digital Footprints.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) operation teams in financial institutions typically rely on numerous data sources to check and clear new customers for matches in financial sanctions registries, adverse media appearances, political exposure relevance, etc. However, these tools alone are often not sufficient to screen all relevant AML/KYC aspects, while ensuring speed and scale at onboarding.

As a way to supplement and optimize their existing AML and KYC procedures and validate new customers, Banca Sella used Trustfull’s identity scoring algorithm powered by digital footprints. The algorithm combines digital signals from various sources to paint a more complete picture of customer validity and risk level.

Trustfull’s powerful identity scoring algorithm can reliably spot irregularities in customer identity by assessing digital signals such as:

• Phone number
• Email address
• Device detection
• IP address detection
• Browser detection
• Associated external service

When collated, these data signals generated an identity score that Banca Sella used to identify suspicious identities requiring further assessments, thus effectively reducing the manual process for identity verification while complementing standard AML and KYC checks.