Country Risk resources available to assess compliance

Below are a number of valuable Internet websites where one can assemble complete information on specific countries for the purpose of assessing country risk. Remember to access the information from at least a couple of these resources, so that you can verify the accuracy of the facts contained therein. World-Check's feature on country risk, known as Country-Check, will be online and available later this year. Details of this resource will appear here in the near future. Watch for it. See worldcheck website here

These are direct hyperlinks to the websites:

• BBC Country Profiles
• Deloitte & Touche Country Snapshots
• US Library of Congress Country Studies
• New Nations
• CIA World Factbook
• UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Country Profiles

Over 2,000 institutions, including 45 of the world’s 50 largest financial institutions and hundreds of government agencies, rely on the World-Check database of known heightened-risk individuals and businesses to efficiently screen their customers, associates, transactions and employees for potential risk. This highly-structured database is updated daily in real-time by World-Check's international, research team and is derived from hundreds of thousands of public sources. It is this unprecedented commitment to ongoing research that has established World-Check as the industry standard. No other service replicates the quality of intelligence in this market-pioneering database.

Coverage includes PEPs, money launderers, fraudsters, terrorists and sanctioned entities, plus individuals and businesses from over a dozen other categories. World-Check's proprietary database and tools have direct uses in the following areas :

• financial compliance,
• anti-money laundering (AML)
• Know-Your-Customer (KYC)
• Politically Exposed Person (PEP)
  
• screening, enhanced due diligence (EDD)
• fraud prevention
• government intelligence and enforcement
• and other identity authentication
• background screening
• risk-prevention practices.

In addition to the financial industry other client sectors include:

• insurance
• legal
• gaming
• aviation
• real estate
• consultancy
• natural resources
• accounting
• and more
  

Moreover, World-Check is a useful and recognised solution for pre-employment/background screening regardless of the industry concerned.

How is World-Check’s intelligence gathered?

World-Check correlates unstructured data in order to provide highly structured intelligence that users can quickly and easily access to protect themselves from potential risk. For this task, teams of multi-lingual researchers and editors located around the world, methodically monitor and check hundreds of thousands of public sources including government, sanction and police sites as well as the national and international media. This open source information is correlated into highly structured profiles on terrorists, fraudsters, narcotics traffickers, shell banks, PEPs, organised crime, sanctioned entities, plus many other categories that pose a lesser risk but are equally of interest. Profiles are linked revealing relationship networks between family members, middlemen and associates - where the real risk often lies.

World-Check also leverages its proprietary network of users via their ability to submit, anonymously, names and details of suspicious parties they themselves have identified – for World-Check researchers to investigate and then add, as appropriate, to its master database. This unique “network effect” enables member client institutions to benefit from the investigative results derived from such reported names, driving powerful user synergies across World-Check’s distribution.