Issues Affecting Client Screening

There are numerous flaws which are typical in client data within any organisation and professional services firms are no exception. Poor underlying data ultimately leads to difficulties in client screening with many false positives and potential for false negatives (missing matches). Poor data quality, as shown in the example below can cover many field types utlimately severely impacting on a firms ability to accurately screen their clients.

• 'Overfilling’ of name data - Where first and last names are placed in a single field rather than split into the correct fields
• Poor spelling of name and address information - making checking against external lists impossible
• Multiple names stored in a single field - husband and wife, business partners etc
• Name information ‘misfielded’ into addresses
• Date of Birth information in various formats
•  Entities and individuals mixed together - a director and a company, for example
• Non-standard name constructs - titles in name fields, hypens in names
• Poorly fielded address information - such as postcodes in town fields
• Non-standard country information - either wrongly spelt or incorrectly abbreviated.

Similarly, external data sources, to which client information is matched, have their own formatting issues. This is especially true where the external source holds extensive information about various aspects of an entity or where information is taken from the public domain and often incomplete.

Law firms often have additional level of client data issues, where client details, vital to the screening process are held within fields other than the client name (such as the Client Narrative field). This is  highlighted in the screenshot below which was taken from a real life situation. Note that benficial owners and controllers have been entered in an unstructured format.