Bank expands remit of anti-terrorist software

Investment bank West LB is to extend its use of name recognition software to help combat terrorism and organised crime.

The German bank is to start trials next year in international offices, including London and Dusseldorf, to prevent known criminals and terrorist suspects from using pseudonyms to channel funds through its system.

Computational linguistics software from Language Analysis Systems will be used to detect cultural differences and phonetic misspellings of names.

‘If a customer tries to join our bank, we want to know that the person is not on some sort of restrictive list,’ said Hagen Schaumkell, director of money laundering prevention at West LB. ‘There are a lot of lists in the banking world, which we
can cross-check with terrorist financing, and we will look to use them next year.’

The NameVariationGenerator technology will be used to cross-check transactions and bank details with more than one billion names collected from more than 200 countries.

Using terrorist financing lists produced by the Bank of England and the US Office of Foreign Asset Control, West LB hopes to reduce the risk of illegal banking activity dramatically.

The bank has been using the technology for more than a year in its anti-money laundering department, as part of an overall strategy to stop fraudulent or illegal activities.

The technology has been used to cross-reference transactions from across its global operations and spot patterns.

‘The technology takes names, generates all the possible variations or cultural differences and then checks against all other transactions,’ said Schaumkell. ‘It helps to stop money laundering and other criminal activities that can lead to occurrences such as drug deals.’

The software, which is also used by the CIA and National Security Agency, helps to identify misspellings and cultural nuances that are not detected by traditional Soundex name recognition systems.