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. Today, we are launching CIP Match and Watchlists to give our partners a smarter 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—leading to unnecessary customer friction and manual review. CIP Match and Watchlists, combined with SentiLink’s fraud detection capabilities, help our partners optimize approval rate, while mitigating risk and reducing costs.

What’s included in CIP Match and Watchlists?

Comprehensive coverage and flexible configuration

CIP Match provides comprehensive coverage to verify consumer identities and allows partners to configure match rules 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 OFAC for better control and support

We’ve built OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) list matching in-house, 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. By optimizing these settings, institutions can reduce both false positives and false negatives while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Intelligent and customizable application routing 

CIP Match enables financial institutions to 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.

A better path to onboarding more of the right customers

Our 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.