CounterpartyLink is progressing the development of its CPL Online legal entity intelligence service with the immediate addition of a compliance index and the promise of hierarchy data for all entities it holds and a visualisation tool to view related data.
The company’s October 2012 commitment to offer beneficial ownership data at a level of 10% ownership of an entity, an improvement on the 25% defined in the European Union Third Money Laundering Directive, has also come to fruition with all entities in the CounterpartyLink database now including 10% ownership data. This data meets the requirements of regulations such as the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and also supports increasingly detailed know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering processes. The beneficial ownership data will go live as part of the CPL Online service tomorrow and is also available to users of CounterpartyLink’s data feeds.
The CounterpartyLink Compliance Index (CCI) is designed to measure the completeness and provenance of evidential sources of entity data and is expected to supplement KYC activity. Every entity in the CounterpartyLink database, which holds 350,000 entities across 200 global jurisdictions, has a rating in one of five categories, with the lowest category representing entities that have no primary source of information in the public domain. The ratings are included in every entity record, allowing users of the online and data feed services to see the quality of the entity data and decide whether to look at the documents behind the data and perhaps seek additional information from the entity itself.
James Redfern, managing director of CounterpartyLink, says: “Both these additions are no-cost upgrades for existing CounterpartyLink users and underline our commitment to provide the latest regulatory compliance and risk tools to our clients. Our users see CPL Online as an invaluable tool for instant verification for client on-boarding and compliance, while the compliance index gives a clear assessment of the quality of available data.”
Redfern says the CPL Online service has attracted towards 100 customers since a soft launch early this year. Many are existing users of the company’s data feeds, but the service has also attracted additional customers wanting real-time access to data that can help them address the issues of client on-boarding. He suggests the company’s independent research of primary sources, documentary evidence behind entity data and ongoing maintenance of data set it apart from other entity data providers, and says the company’s services are gaining users both in offshore jurisdictions where many firms handle KYC and due diligence, and among tier one and two banks, and asset managers.
Looking forward, Redfern expects to commercialise hierarchy data around entities in the CounterpartyLink database – a useful addition to available legal entity identifiers already in the database – and, depending on customer demand, provide a visualisation front-end for CPL Online. “We are often asked for data hierarchies as they are important for screening when on-boarding clients. We have the necessary data in the database, but we need to put it into a product so that customers can access it,” he says. The company is already responding to one-off requests for entity hierarchy data, but hopes to make a complete product available some time next year. A visualisation tool for CPL Online is also under discussion although Redfern suggests that if this idea is productised it is like to be based on existing third-party software.
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