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As of January 1, 2024, businesses must report all beneficial ownership information (BOI) to the U.S. government, according to the latest FinCEN mandate. This new regulation falls under the 2021 bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act (CTA), which aims to make it harder for bad actors to hide gains through hidden ownership structures and shell companies. But there is still some uncertainty of what new BOI reporting standards – and a new BOI database – will mean for the financial institutions (FIs) that serve reporting businesses. Currently, FIs rely on customer-reported BOI under the Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Final Rule — but the CTA database potentially offers a new avenue for collecting information. How FIs access and incorporate this data into their pre-established Bank Secrecy Act / Anti-Money Laundering (BSA/AML) compliance processes, though, still hasn’t been fully answered by FinCEN. Enigma chatted with Ballard Spahr’s Peter Hardy, a former federal prosecutor, and current national thought leader on the subject of money laundering, anti-money laundering, and criminal tax law. Hardy discussed how FIs can use BOI obtained under the CTA to conduct enhanced due diligence, what accessing the new BOI database might look like for FIs, and the remaining questions facing FIs — such as how to align their duties under the CTA and CDD rules and how to adjust their compliance process to new BOI reporting standards...
27 million people are currently victims of human trafficking worldwide. They are being forced into labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of modern slavery. Human traffickers make an estimated $150 billion every year. Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans 18-45. The drug is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. The illicit drug trade is a $650 billion dollar business annually, greater than the entire GDP of Sweden. Where does all that money go? Money laundering is the world’s 3rd largest business. An estimated 4 trillion dollars are illicitly laundered every year. The bulk of that comes from nefarious activities and organized crime. To combat this, every financial institution is constantly combing through a vast matrix of data for markers of financial crime. Financial institutions filed over 251 million suspicious activity reports to U.S. regulators last year alone. Sanctions are a critical measure towards combating financial crimes and serving our national security interests. Sanctions compliance is a greater challenge than ever before thanks to the rapidly evolving geopolitical stage. Enigma set out to make sanctions compliance a sure bet for highly regulated institutions in the most cost-effective, reliable and transparent manner possible.
After the collapse of First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year, banks have had an increased focus on growing deposit relationships and volumes. Enigma is helping banks on this front, providing data to improve their prospecting efforts and win new customers...
Our customers often ask us about the landscape of companies providing data about small businesses. Unfortunately, there aren’t any magic quadrants or industry reports that we can send them. The small business data space doesn’t get a lot of outside attention despite the fact that it is growing and innovating rapidly. Enigma is revolutionizing the way businesses access critical information. As a company that has been working with data about U.S. businesses since 2011, we’ve acquired a deep knowledge of this landscape. We hope that this report will provide B2SMB companies with a resource they can use to understand: - Which companies specialize in data about small businesses? - What kinds of data does each company provide? - Which companies are a good fit for which types of data problems? (seen in the more detailed report)
Webinar: How to Optimize Your KYB Process: Build In-House, Single Partner, or Waterfall Wondering how to navigate building your KYB process amid a rapidly changing legislative environment and high operational costs? Enigma was joined by Alloy, Detected, and IDology in a discussion on how financial institutions can find the best KYB process for their needs, what to look for in a data vendor, and why KYB can actually be a competitive advantage for FIs. In this webinar we discuss topics like: - The pros and cons of in-house KYB, single-provider partnerships, and data waterfalling - Metrics you should consider when implementing a KYB process or choosing a KYB vendor such as conversion and coverage - Why KYB and KYC are actually a competitive advantage – instead of legislative hassle – for your business
In this guide to KYB, we’ll look at the history of KYB legislation – and where we’ve arrived today, who has a duty to comply, and how KYB requirements can be met.
Sometime in the mythical past, we software developers learned that testing in production was a bad idea. We developed a pattern of testing and deployment based on dev/stage/prod environments (or some variant of these concepts)...
Enigma gathered top female financial services executives from companies like Citizens Bank, Comerica Bank, and Amazon for an intimate round table discussion with author, HBS Senior Fellow, and Obama-Era SBA Administrator Karen Mills on the opportunities and challenges in the small-and-medium-sized business (SMB) economy. Despite the fact that “over half of the people who work in the US economy own or work for a small business,” Mills asserted that she “often had to pound the table in the West Wing to make sure the voice of small business was heard.”
How are today’s small businesses navigating growth across channels and what role can access to capital play? The Enigma Blog sat down with entrepreneur Sarah Burrows, co-founder of Modern Sprout, to discuss D2C vs. wholesale, the advantages of PO financing, and how to navigate periods of rapid growth...
Getting a Clear View of Revenues at Seasonal Businesses Small business lenders are constantly searching for the right balance between gathering critical information from loan applicants and streamlining the application process. Lenders want to see the historical financials of a business, but as more financial information is requested, more applicants will drop out of the process...
