Xapien is a category leader in Chartis’s 2022 Entity Management and Analytics report

We’re delighted to announce that Xapien has been named a category leader in Chartis’s 2022 Entity Management and Analytics report.

“We ranked Xapien as a category leader in our inaugural Entity Management and Analytics report based on its innovative approach to data collection, processing and analytics, especially its ability to meaningfully combine a wide range of data sources into a consolidated view.

The ability to perform this at vast scale and at speed is equally compelling – we view these attributes as being core to the direction the entity management sector is moving in.”

Nick Vitchev, Research Director at Chartis.

Over the last year, developments such as the imposition of Russian sanctions have reinforced the fact that financial institutions are today dealing with a broad range of operational risks. Their ability to identify and analyse internal and external risks is more important than ever. Many organisations are now implementing advanced, AI-powered systems for managing and assessing the risks posed by the entities they work with. However, there are many software solutions available, all with different capabilities.

The Chartis RiskTech Entities Management and Analytics Solutions report evaluates these solutions based on factors such as coverage and scalability, the range and depth of data, and the capability to enhance data with additional information. It was written by experienced analysts, who have hands-on experience of selecting, developing and implementing risk management systems for a variety of international companies in a range of industries, including banking, insurance, capital markets, energy and the public sector.

Chartis, the leading provider of research and analysis on the global risk technology market, said Xapien’s innovative approach to data collection, processing and analytics set us apart from other providers. Our technology’s ability to meaningfully combine a wide range of data sources into a consolidated view impressed the analysts, while its vast scale and speed was described as ‘compelling’.

Chartis’s category leaders combine depth and breadth of functionality, technology and content with the required organisational characteristics to capture significant share in their market. Solutions are assessed on the completeness of their offering and their market potential. Xapien scored highly in both areas.

Chartis’s 2022 Entity Management and Analytics report

We are in a time of time of fast moving global developments and intense, evolving regulator scrutiny. For example, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control is set to start investigating sanctions breached via digital channels, and in near-real time. Financial institutions need to pay more attention to potential risks in their operations than ever before.

Almost a year has now passed since sanctions were imposed against Russia. Financial institutions have got used to reducing their risks in relation to these sanctions, but fresh risks have emerged in unexpected places as a result.

For example, firms affected by the downturn or a loss of Russian clients might turn to activities that shift their operational risk profile. In this case, they need to be equipped with the right entity management tools that enable them to understand who they are working with.

“Increasingly, to manage risk exposures at the entity level, firms need a holistic view of a customer’s identifying attributes alongside more technical details about their commercial affiliations and business and operational behaviour.”

Chartis

To help financial organisations stave off risk, Chartis evaluated entity management solutions, including Xapien, based on coverage and scalability, the range and depth of data, and the capability to enhance data with additional information.

About entity management and analytics

Entity management enables financial institutions to view all of the information they hold on an individual, an organisation, or even an object in a single place. Names, addresses, emails and dates of birth are among the information that might be held. Often, collecting this information involves combining records from multiple departments or jurisdictions in which the institution operates.

Institutions can use entity analytics to resolve identity conflicts within their records, so that they better understand relationships, transactions, and events.

Why Xapien is a category leader

Coverage

Xapien’s coverage was commended as ‘best in class’, the very highest ranking available, for its ability to combine a wide range of data sources into a consolidated view.

Xapien is unique in being an all-in-one know your customer and due diligence solution that can be run on people or companies. It is not confined to data sets, but searches and collates all available knowledge about any entity from across the internet and commercial data sources. It helps organisations form fast, traceable decisions with confidence.

When you enter a name into Xapien, it is checked against PEPs and sanctions databases, news and media articles, corporate records and wider internet data from sites such as LinkedIn, Wikileaks, offshore leaks, and more.

Natural Language Processing identifies key networks and affiliations, enabling organisations to be aware of current and potential risks relating to any entity. For example, someone might not be directly sanctioned, but could be mentioned in media articles as a ‘close friend’ of a sanctioned person. Traditional sanctions checks would not reveal this link, but Xapien can.

Xapien can read and analyse sources in 133 languages and counting, including scripts such as Arabic and Cyrilic. Background checks can be carried out on clients operating in multiple jurisdictions just as easily as those operating locally.

Xapien automatically identifies assets, associates, wealth, business roles, descriptions, quotes and affiliations, then provides avenues for further exploration. The results are displayed in a single, shareable report, alongside their original sources.

Scalability

Xapien’s scalability was commended as an ‘advanced capability’. It combines a wide range of data sources into a consolidated view that is useful for multiple operations and departments.

Xapien equips organisations with fast, easy-to-use insights that enable enhanced due diligence (EDD). Large or distributed teams can all access the same information and be confident that they are following the same due diligence procedures.

Xapien’s technology is designed to work across any type of data set from video content, to blogs to structured corporate records. This gives it unparalleled scaling potential. As the team grows, Xapien will be able to take any organisation’s bespoken data requirements and feed them into the system so that they are understood, analysed and reported on in the same consistent way. This is hugely powerful.

Launching due diligence searches with Xapien requires only the most basic technological skills. It is as easy as inputting a name, adding some simple context, and hitting go. The platform then searches through all online data, using powerful AI algorithms to identify the information that is relevant to you and your subject.

Use of data

Xapien’s use of data was described as ‘innovative’.

For every document or data point that Xapien ingests, it extracts all of the people, locations, companies etc mentioned in the document, and links them with the events and facts that relate to them on a vast ‘knowledge graph’.

It then “resolves” all of these fragments of knowledge graph from each individual document to bring together the entities, events and facts that it has determined do actually refer to your subject.

All of this is passed through Neurisk, our neural risk processing engine, which identifies which events carried risk.

The result is a rich and detailed view of the subject and their network of connections, and potential risks around them. It is as nuanced as what a human researcher would produce, but available in just 10 minutes.

Data enhancement

Chartis described Xapien’s data processing and analytics as ‘innovative’. Its ‘vast scale and speed’ were ‘equally compelling’.

Whereas most other tools on the market only look at one, or a discrete set of data, Xapien takes an incredibly broad approach, reading the entire indexed internet. This enables Xapien to enrich data at incredible scale and accuracy, because it simply gathers so much data about a particular subject. It doesn’t just provide matches on data such as names and job titles, but it can attach facts to people and companies, identifying how they participated in events, where those events took place and who else was involved. Whether that event was a job, investment, takeover or marriage, it can set everything in context.

Names can be unreliable when it comes to accurately identifying individuals or companies. Xapien solves this by looking at the information surrounding the mention, such as other people, organisations, and topics to determine whether the same person or company is being referred to. It also understands the semantic meaning of words in context. For example, it knows whether an article is referring to ‘an apple’ or ‘Apple’ the company, or the difference between ‘poaching an egg’ and ‘poaching an elephant’.

Websites and news articles often only mention the full name of a person or company once, before using pronouns (he/she/it) or descriptors (the billionaire). Xapien can identify and tie together these references, to determine whether risk or facts are actually about your subject, or someone else.

Xapien identifies every face in every image on every page and article it processes. Using neural networks, key facial features are extracted and matched across all other facial features in Xapien’s knowledge graph. By drawing on vast geospatial data sets and machine inference, Xapien is able to resolve locations, regardless of the script used, anywhere in the world.

Depth and breadth of functionality

Xapien’s fully-automated background reports provide rapid early insights on holistic risk.

In minutes, Xapien can uncover information that analysts carrying out desktop research would take days to find. It can be used to find niche, hard-to-find information on a person or business. All of the flagged risks can be expanded if you want to learn more about them.
Xapien’s levels of accuracy and depth have only been possible previously using enormous teams of analysts, while its speed is unmatched. User-friendly automation allows these insights to be reported to decision-makers within minutes, empowering firms to make informed decisions.

Harnessing carefully trained AI models and powerful Natural Language Processing, Xapien scours the length and breadth of the internet, reading and analysing millions of online corporate records, shareholder data, media and news articles, in five to 10 minutes. It recognises, understands and categorises patterns and connections that reveal risks. Risk categories can be toggled on or off.

But Xapien’s use isn’t confined to risk. Each report reveals a wealth of further information about the subject from assets to descriptors to quotes. There are a vast range of potential applications for Xapien’s reports.

Importantly, though it isn’t confined to these risks alone, it integrates information from across the entire indexed internet, and commercial databases such as corporate records, and assess risk from each of these sources. This enables it to make a far more accurate assessment of the veracity of a particular ‘hit’ on a screening list. It can join dots analysts might overlook by reading and ‘learning’ with each search. For example, if a news article identifies a business associate, Xapien will make the link to corporate data which gives a date of birth that could previously have been missed. That will then allow it to confirm an entity has been sanctioned.

It doesn’t just highlight these database risks though, but flags risks from content gathered across the length and breadth of the internet. It even highlights when someone is mentioned in media articles as a friend of a problematic figure, or appears in photographs besides them. Traditional sanctions checks would not flag these risks, but Xapien can identify key networks and affiliations.

Reporting and presentation layer

Chartis said Xapien ‘meaningfully combines a wide range of data sources into a consolidated view’.

Within ten minutes, Xapien produces an easily shareable and fully sourced report summarising analysis and insights. The reports are easy-to-digest, categorised, and segmented. They are intuitively laid out in a way that compliance teams and decision makers will recognise. Features such as time stamps and PDF downloads guarantee full auditability. Everyone gets the same information, allowing organisations to move at speed and avoid delays caused by misunderstandings. Firms can make quick decisions about new or existing entities in the network, fully informed of any risks involved – even those they didn’t think to search for.