No matter the number of customers or suppliers or partners you have, there's one solution that's best for making sure you stay on the right side of the law ...and regulators. Our Mark Brannan explained recently at a Dow Jones webinar.
LONDON (AEB) – Your company may have 50,000 customers. Or your company may have 10,000 suppliers. But whatever the makeup of your database, one thing is absolutely certain – the best solution for monitoring trade compliance in any scenario is software.
This according to Mark Brannan, AEB’s International Business Development Director, in a widely attended webinar last week hosted by U.S. news and information icon Dow Jones, the international front-runner in compliance screening data and content partner for AEB’s industry-leading sanctions list screening solutions.
‘’Most of you as businesses have quite large databases of customers and suppliers,’’ Brannan said. ‘’If you are trying to check all of those against all of the entities listed on government-issued sanctions lists, it’s an impossible task. This is where software can really support.’’
The webinar was attended by 160 listeners and focused on the evolving challenges in trade compliance in both Europe and Asia. Brannan was joined by Aline Doussin, a partner at the international law firm Hogan Lovells and well-known expert in trade law, and Kevin Cahill, director of Companies Ownership Research at Dow Jones.
Doussin said trade wars and the resulting market turmoil has made doing business in global trade more difficult now than it was four years ago.
‘’I have been advising on sanctions compliance for 10 years now and I always say that I feel for my clients,’’ she said. ‘’Their work has become much more difficult because sanctions law is increasingly used as a geopolitical tool."
Cahill said his team at Dow Jones is challenged to discover risks in company ownership that may not be obvious to observers trying to determine if a company meets compliance regulation guidelines.
He specifically focused on the 50 Percent Rule from the US’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). It states that property and interests in property of entities directly or indirectly owned 50 percent or more in the aggregate by one or more blocked persons are considered blocked. This is regardless of whether such entities appear on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.
‘’In order to provide the most effective list, our inclusion criteria goes beyond the 50 percent rule,’’ Cahill said. ‘’This allows customers to identify possible risks that only including majority ownership would not provide. This helps to deal with the cautionary zone. ‘’
Catching such issues with customers , partners, or suppliers can be tricky and difficult though at companies that don’t employ a software solution that not only removes the chance for human error but can integrate into processes used in day-to-day operations.
‘’Software will do things in a standard and repeatable way and I think that is very important when you are talking about processes,’’ said Brannan. ‘’You can be confident you have done the right checks in the right way.’’
He added that compliance must be a key mission objective for any company doing business in today’s global arena.
‘’I have been working in this industry for 20 years now and when I first started the standard compliance department used to be down a very long corridor and no one wanted anything to do with it because they were seen as preventing business or slowing business down,’’ Brannan said.
‘’Now the export controls and compliance department is seen as really protecting the business financially.’’
AEB’s Compliance Screening software automatically runs restricted party screening for companies in the background as the business day goes on. It checks your business partners against relevant global sanctions lists – quickly and reliably. Moreover, the intelligent software can be used anywhere in the world and warns you before a business partner becomes a liability.
‘’Our software has Dow Jones content fully integrated,’’ Brannan noted. ‘’Whether it is politically exposed persons, state-owned companies, or adverse media. If you need to check for those you can do that directly using our software and those checks are done in a fully automated way.’’
Brannan said the software solution also allows you to keep secure, accurate, and comprehensive records for the event of an audit. And the data can also be used to produce management reports to examine how effective you’re being in your compliance organization.
Integrating processes and systems throughout international supply chains reduces trade risks and increases cross-border efficiency. This applies especially to business partner screening, as it has a direct impact on the security of your business. Compliance Screening from AEB offers a wide range of integration options for ERP and CRM systems : In SAP®, Salesforce, proAlpha®, abas ERP – and via API in many more.
