CIP Match and Watchlists: A Smarter Approach to Onboarding Customers

At SentiLink, we’ve built our reputation on helping financial institutions detect and prevent synthetic fraud and identity theft. Now, we are launching CIP Match and Watchlists to give our partners a better way to meet their compliance requirements and onboard more legitimate customers. Powered by our deep knowledge of consumer identity, SentiLink now provides more complete coverage across the identity verification stage of your onboarding funnel.

Managing risk and approval rates with SentiLink

During onboarding, financial institutions must carefully balance four critical factors:

• Compliance risk: Ensuring adherence to Customer Identification Program (CIP) rules established by the Patriot Act and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA)

• Fraud losses: Identifying and blocking fraudulent applications, including stolen and synthetic identities, to prevent financial losses

• Approval rates: Maximizing the number of legitimate customers approved without unnecessary drop-off and rejections

• Operational costs: Reducing expenses associated with manual review and document verification while maintaining compliance and stopping fraud

When compliance and fraud risk assessments operate separately, inefficiencies arise. The inevitable result is unnecessary customer friction and too much manual review. CIP Match and Watchlists, combined with SentiLink’s fraud detection capabilities, helps our partners optimize approval rates while mitigating risk and reducing costs. In real-world data tests this year, adding SentiLink gave partners an average +8.6% increase in approval rates (without increasing fraud losses). 

What’s included in CIP Match and Watchlists?

Comprehensive coverage

CIP Match leverages a variety of data sources, including authoritative government data and SentiLink first-party data, to provide comprehensive coverage. In particular, SentiLink CIP offers strong coverage of applicants with ITINs, applicants with limited credit history, and younger applicants — all demographics that traditional CIP solutions struggle with.

Flexible configuration

SentiLink CIP Match doesn't just return a simple yes/no, we return scores from 0-1 for each PII element, allowing partners to configure matching rules, fuzzy matching logic, and risk thresholds tailored to their specific business needs. By breaking down Personally Identifiable Information (PII) components, such as first name, last name, and address, CIP Match improves decision accuracy—reducing false positives and negatives while increasing approvals for legitimate customers.

In-house watchlists for fewer false positives

SentiLink Watchlists leverages in-house watchlists for compliance checks against OFAC, PEP and Adverse Media lists, rather than relying on a white-labeled solution. This approach gives our partners greater configuration control and better support, allowing them to fine-tune their screening criteria with adjustable fuzzy name matching and birth date radius parameters. 

As many official watchlist entries are vague (for example, some entries include a range of years rather than a specific birthdate), false positives are common — most watchlist "hits" aren't really hits, they're just added friction for legitimate customers who happen to share (for example) a name with a bad actor. By allowing partners to optimize the matching settings used for these lists, SentiLink Watchlists helps institutions reduce both false positives and false negatives while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Intelligent and customizable application routing 

SentiLink CIP Match enables financial institutions to easily route applications for manual review or step-up verification when necessary. By leveraging SentiLink’s advanced identity analysis, partners can enforce red flag rules efficiently, ensuring compliance and reducing risk without introducing unnecessary friction for trustworthy applicants.

Seamless integration for CIP and fraud detection

By consolidating fraud detection and CIP checks into a single API endpoint, SentiLink simplifies integration, allowing partners to coordinate fraud and CIP risk assessments seamlessly. This integration eliminates redundancies, optimizes onboarding decisions, and reduces operational costs.

Intuitive review UI and case escalation for tricky manual reviews

In real-world data tests, SentiLink CIP Match and Watchlists has significantly reduced the number of manual reviews for partners, but some amount of manual review will always be necessary. SentiLink's intuitive manual review dashboard brings together relevant information in one place, allowing for more efficient evaluation of applications. SentiLink partners may also escalate tricky cases to SentiLink's Fraud Intelligence Team to get a second opinion.

A better path to onboarding more of the right customers

SentiLink's mission has always been to help businesses approve more legitimate customers while keeping bad actors out. With CIP Match and Watchlists, SentiLink provides a streamlined solution that balances compliance, fraud prevention, and customer experience—helping our partners onboard more of the right customers with confidence.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today to start optimizing your onboarding funnel.