Bottomline Launches Real-Time Watchlist Screening

Bottomline, a leading provider of financial technology that makes complex business payments simple, smart, and secure, today announced the availability of Bottomline Watchlist Screening (WLS) delivered by lightweight API implementation through Bottomline’s SaaS technology. Bottomline’s payments expertise, shaped across multiple junctions of the payment lifecycle helped engineer a sanctions' solution that can reduce false positives dramatically, offers faster go-live, and is less costly than many alternatives.  The first North American financial institution and the first multinational corporate customers are implementing Watchlist Screening. WLS is available to financial institutions and corporates globally, who can easily implement it with existing Bottomline secure payments solutions or as a standalone solution. WLS screens originator, beneficiary and counter-party transactions in real-time against official sanctions lists built into the solution and published by international regulatory bodies including the EU, HMT, OFAC, OFSI and UN. Bottomline Watchlist Screening’s integrated sanctions lists empower financial institutions and corporates to:

• Comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Counter Terrorist Financing (CTF), Know Your Customer (KYC) and Wire Transfer Regulations (WTR2) — including AML, CTF, and KYC screening, and AML and KYC compliance
• Centralize and automate transaction Sanctions screening, including alerting, workflows and reporting to overcome limited compliance/risk resources available to manage and process large volumes of data
• Implement and refine AML/CTF risk models to reduce false positives when identifying and screening sanctioned and high-risk entities.

Global financial and corporate organizations rely on Bottomline for domestic and international payments, state-of-the-art fraud detection, insider fraud protection, behavioral analytics, consolidated cash management and regulatory compliance solutions. Bottomline’s fraud and financial crime solutions for Banking include Secure Payments, Insider Fraud, Enterprise Case Manager and Compliance solutions, which are used by hundreds of banks worldwide to manage fraud across all fraud types and also used by Bottomline to protect our own payment network. Bottomline’s capabilities have been recognized in the Major Players category of the IDC Marketscape: World Enterprise Fraud Management in Banking 2020 Vendor Assessment #US45617020, July 2020. “Financial institutions and enterprises continue to struggle to screen ever-growing volumes of customer and transaction data against a variety of watchlists,” said Arin Ray, Senior Analyst with Celent's Securities & Investments practice. “Ongoing regulatory scrutiny around the world, always evolving watchlists and the the increasing complexity of a globally-interconnect financial system have exposed the limitations of traditional technology solutions in screening.  The need for real-time, integrated sanctions intelligence is becoming an imperative.” “Bottomline is committed to fighting fraud and financial crime across the full life of payment in the highly digital, global, and regulated world of transactions,” said Omri Kletter, VP, Fraud, and Financial Crime, Bottomline. “We’ve embarked on a journey to disrupt the sanction screening market. This shake-up aims to help banks and corporates comply with the regulation in a modern way, with dramatically lowered false-positive results. Using a SaaS-based approach, our view across payment junctions lets us extend our fraud expertise to bring corporates and financial institutions a watchlist screening offering that is easy to use, fast to implement and offers core protection across the lifecycle of payments.”