Overview

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) watchlists are lists issued by national and international bodies such as the FBI, Interpol, and The United Nations that contain names of individuals and companies that have participated in criminal activities. Watchlists are usually updated by these institutions with the latest information they have obtained.

MetaMap's AML Watchlist Merit checks your user against more than 1,200 international watchlists, sanctions lists, and politically exposed persons (PEP) lists to protect you from onboarding users who might be criminals, terrorists, money launderers, fraudsters, or PEPs.

Features

• Basic Watchlist Check

  We check whether a user is listed on 20 international watchlists as a free service that you can include into your metamap. If a user is on a list, we will mark the verification as "Review Needed".

• Premium Watchlist Check

  If enabled, we check whether a user is listed on 1000+ premium AML watchlists. If a user is on a list, we will mark the verification as "Review Needed".

• Premium Watchlist Monitoring

  If you are using Premium Watchlists, you can enable daily premium watchlist monitoring. We will run a daily check of each of your users to determine if they are on the watchlist. If a user is found on a watchlist during a monitoring check, we will send you a webhook notification and mark the verification as "Review Needed".

• Customize fuzziness of name matching

  If you are using Premium Watchlists, you can configure how strict or "fuzzy" the name match should be between your user's ID document and a watchlist. A fuzziness of 0 means the name has to match the document exactly without switching the order of names or checking for accented characters. A fuzziness of 100% means we can look for a match by switching the order of all letters. The recommended range is between 30% and 90% fuzziness.

User Flow

To complete an AML Watchlist check, a user has to complete the Document Verification step.

How it Works

If a user passes the Document Verification step and the AML Watchlist step, they will be "Verified". If the user fails the AML Watchlist step, they will be marked as "Review Needed".

Setup

Step 1: Set up a Metamap

The first step to setting up AML Watchlists is to create a new metamaps in the Dashboard. Once you've created a new experience, add the AML Watchlist product to the user flow.

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The merit requires the Document Verification merit

Users must upload valid identifying documents as part of this merit.

There are two main configurations:

1. Basic watchlist check
2. Premium watchlist check

Basic watchlist check setup

Implement this configuration if you want basic watchlist coverage for your users.

To implement this:

1. Login to the dashboard, and create a metamap
2. In your metamap, add the AML Watchlist block
3. Update the Document Verification configuration
   • Click on "Add Step 1" and choose the document type options you will display to users
4. Click "Save" and your experience is ready to use

Premium watchlist check

Implement this configuration if you want the most robust watchlist coverage for your users.

To implement this:

1. Login to the dashboard, and create a metamap
2. In your metamap, add the AML Watchlist block
3. Update the AML Watchlist configuration in the right hand panel
   • Turn on the "Search" toggle to enable Premium Watchlist checks
   • If required, turn on "Monitoring" to enable daily watchlist monitoring
4. Update the Document Verification configuration
   • Click on "Add Step 1" and choose the document type options you will display to users
5. Click "Save" and your experience is ready to use

Step 2: Integrate

There are 3 ways you can use MetaMap's AML Watchlist:

1. Direct Link — Send your users a link to sign documents on MetaMap's prebuilt UX
2. MetaMap Button Button — Integrate our MetaMap Button SDK into your application to use our prebuilt UX
3. API — Integrate our API into your application and build your own AML Watchlist UX

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Direct Link

If you are not a developer, or you don't have the resources to integrate at this time, you can start using MetaMap's AML Watchlist block in minutes without any code using our Direct Link.

To implement this:

1. Setup the metamap for AML Watchlists in the dashboard
2. Get the Direct Link
3. Send the Direct Link to your users

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Integrate our MetaMap Button via SDK

Use our SDK integration if you want to use MetaMap's verification tools but design your own verification experience for your users.

To implement this:

1. Setup the metamap for AML Watchlists in the dashboard
2. Install and implement an SDK framework

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Integrate via API

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The API is available as a premium feature

Reach out to your customer success manager or [email protected].

Use our API Integration if you want to use MetaMap's verification tools but design your own verification experience for your users.

To implement this:

1. Setup the metamap for AML Watchlists in the dashboard
2. Send a request to the Authentication endpoint to get a authentication token
3. Pass your Experience ID into the Create Verification to get the verification id and the inputs
4. When your user uploads their ID document, pass your verification id and inputs into the Send User Identifiers endpoint
5. Pass the user verification information to the Comply Advantage API, specifying the entity type (person or company) and name.

Step 3: Process Verification Results

AML Watchlist Checks will result in a "Verified" or "Review Needed" status. but never a "Rejected" status.

There are two ways you can process verification results for AML Watchlist checks:

• In the Dashboard
• Using Webhooks

Dashboard Verification Results

In the dashboard, under the Verifications tab, the document summary for each verification will show whether or not a user was a match with a watchlist.

Webhook Verification Results

Webhooks are available only for premium AML checks.

You will need to configure your webhooks, then handle the webhook responses that will be sent to your webhook URL.

AML premium webhooks