Web Shield Services GmbH - Virtual Address Detection

Company: Web Shield Services GmbH, Leipzig, Sachsen
Company Description: At Web Shield, our mission is to equip the payments industry with the tools to protect itself from bad actors involved in illegal or non-compliant activities. Our highly precise research tools deliver crucial information for making informed decisions about prospective clients, and sounding the alarm when current clients behave dubiously.
Nomination Category: Kategorie für Neue Produkte und Produktmanagement Awards
Nomination Sub Category: Bestes neues Produkt oder Dienstleistung - Software - Governance-, Risk- & Compliance-Lösungen

Nomination Title: Virtual Address Detection

Beschreiben Sie der Jury das nominierte neue Produkt oder den neuen Service (bis zu 525 Wörter). Konzentrieren Sie sich auf die Features, die Funktionen, die Vorteile und die bisherige Vertriebsleistung. Nutzen Sie unsere Upload-Funktion (siehe Link oben), um eine beliebige Menge Zusatzinformationen in Form von Pressebewertungen, Kundenaussagen, Fotos und Videos Ihrem Beitrag beizufügen:

Especially since the Panama Papers, it has become clear that doing business with a company exclusively registered under a virtual office is inherently risky. To help you assess this risk, we developed Virtual Address Detection.

In more than eight years of underwriting high-risk merchants for the card acquiring industry, we dealt with our fair share of fraudsters hiding behind nominee directors in a virtual office. In fact, Web Shield has been building and maintaining an extensive address database since 2012. Today, it holds more than 50 Million addresses, enriched with information concerning incorporation services, fraud, high-risk businesses and other important risk indicators.

Evaluating the information found in our database combined with the results of several investigative modules, Virtual Address Detection delivers a consolidated virtual address risk scoring for every address you enter – in just a few seconds.

How It Works

The Virtual Address Detection probability score is based on eight areas:

Address Validation: Does the given address even exist?
Complaints: Do customer complaints for the address exist?
Negative News: Is the address connected to negative news reports?
High-Risk Business: Are there current or historical high-risk businesses connected to the address?
Street View Analysis: With the help of advanced artificial intelligence, we analyse and classify the address’ Google Street View image.
Entity Identification: What entities (and how many) are connected to the address?
Offshore Databases: Since the release of the Panama and Paradise Papers, data journalists have built impressive databases of offshore addresses. We integrate them in our evaluation.
Neighbourhood Screen: The density of virtual offices in the vicinity of the investigated address is another factor that is considered.

All data points are summarised in a Virtual Address report. That way, curious investigators can dig deeper into the evidence. For a more immediate integration, we also provide an API that allows you to work with the probability score directly in your native CRM.

Who Benefits?

In general, every organisation that works with other businesses benefits from knowing more about their partners, suppliers or contractors. Crucially, you should always know if claims against a given company address can even be enforced if something goes wrong.

That goes double for financial institutions specialising in corporate banking, financial services, payment service providers, acquiring and issuing bank. Knowing if a business misleads them about their real location can be a crucial data point to consider for their risk departments. It may prevent involvement in illegal financial schemes which can have serious reputational and financial repercussions.

Encouraging Results

Virtual address detection is currently in its beta stages and due to launch in March 2019.

Many of its components, however, have been used in Web Shield’s underwriting and monitoring solutions since 2016. A recent study (see attachment) conducted by Web Shield applied these methods to a total number of 53.461 addresses from over 180 global banks and financial service providers. The results yielded a total of 3.389 virtual addresses, which means that more than 6,3% of the addresses in question were positively identified as virtual.

These results reinforce the evidence that our solutions are already helping acquiring banks to effectively fight money laundering through shell companies.