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Research's WebFountain flows into the financial services sector
With the passage of Section 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act, financial institutions can be required by law to assess the risk that high-transaction customers may be laundering money. The information necessary to determine this does not reside in structured databases; rather, the most current information usually sits in the more than four billion pages of unstructured information on the Web, as well as within other crucial information sources.
WebFountain, IBM’s web-scale business intelligence platform, provides valuable insight by uncovering relationships, patterns and trends. This technology, the result of more than four years of work at IBM's research labs, collects and analyzes millions of pages of structured and unstructured data from a variety of public information sources to help financial services companies quickly assess potential money-laundering risks.
Integrated with the WebFountain platform, the Semagix CIRAS application allows for Web-wide queries to be linked to other disparate sources of information. The result provides a unique ability to help quantify risk and perform rich, intuitive analysis on prospective or existing customers, utilizing data and content from numerous sources.
"The current processes for identifying and verifying a person or a company are very static and rely on a small number of information sources such as those used for credit scoring," explained Semagix President and CEO Larry Levy. "These new regulations, combined with the sheer scale and diversity of information that can be referenced, have created the need for this type of real time, web-scale solution."
Based on sophisticated unstructured data mining and semantic metadata technologies, the IBM-Semagix solution enables risk and compliance teams to cost-effectively respond to changes in legislation that influence anti-money laundering initiatives.
"This relationship is a core part of the WebFountain strategy, which includes partnering for industry-specific applications," said IBM WebFountain Vice President Robert Carlson. "Together, the Semagix CIRAS application and the WebFountain platform create a complete anti-money laundering solution."
This solution is positioned to complement a number of IBM's existing independent software vendor alliances with expertise in risk and anti-money laundering, such as Searchspace, Mantas, and SAS.
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology (IT) company and provider of IT services. IBM and its partners provide their clients with a complete range of products in advanced information technology, from hardware and software to services and complex application solutions to outsourcing projects and training facilities. IBM Research has produced more breakthroughs than any other company in the IT industry and has more than 3,000 scientists and engineers at eight labs in six countries. IBM and WebFountain are trademarks or registered trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation in the United States and other countries.
About Semagix
Semagix has developed patented, semantics-based enterprise information integration and knowledge discovery technologies. Using its semantic metadata approach, Semagix lets enterprise customers integrate and extract insights from their structured and unstructured information assets in order to conceive and develop smarter business processes and applications. The Semagix approach has proven itself in solutions as diverse as airline passenger risk-assessment for airports, anti-money laundering, criminal investigation, drug discovery as well as next generation portal delivery. Semagix is headquartered in London, England, with U.S. offices in Athens, Georgia, New York and Washington D.C. More information can be found at www.semagix.com.