Sanctions check solution created for insurers as Ukraine unrest worsens

Sydney-based Ben Webster, the co-founder of insurtech Agile Underwriting Services, has designed a cost-effective way to manage sanctions checks especially for the insurance industry.

Sanctions Check was built for brokers, MGA, insurance agencies and insurers seeking a streamlined way to search, track and report on sanctions checks.

It uses data from US, European and Australian official lists and over 1 million sanctions checks have run through the platform since it was launched late last year. The technology has been embedded at Agile and insurers, Lloyd’s coverholders and UK customers have already signed up as customers.

“With the unrest in Ukraine we’ve been updating sanctions lists daily,” Mr Webster said. “Having this embedded in our processes helps us stay on top of compliance.”

It is a requirement that insurance industry members be sure their dealings are not with entities registered on anti-money laundering lists – an onerous task when this information changes rapidly. Western allies have ratcheted up economic pressure on Russia, introducing unprecedented economic sanctions such as cutting off Russia from the global SWIFT payments systems and freezing assets of oligarchs linked to President Vladimir Putin.

“It can be a real pain to implement and to track and you have got to provide evidence that you have done it when you go through audits each year,” Mr Webster tells insuranceNEWS.com.au.

“It was a real pain for us so we scratched our own itch and built the app.”

Competing services are cost prohibitive, he says, or targeted more at banks and financial services firms that need Know Your Customer (KYC) police and credit checks and so are not tailored to insurance.

“All we do is sanction checking and we do it really fast and we keep it really, really simple. The best thing about it is that it provides an audit trail – you can say here are the individual searches we did between last year and this year or last month and this month, and you can provide that to your auditors to show that you are meeting your requirements.”

The team are currently updating daily across eight different lists each day in Australia, the UK, US, European Union, United Nations and Switzerland.

“It is working really well. We have insurers and some Lloyd’s coverholders who are using it with really good success,” Mr Webster said.