Amber Road to protect shippers from “Politically Exposed Persons”

Amber Road, a leading provider of cloud-based global trade management (GTM) solutions, announced this week that it has added advanced Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) lists to

Its Global Knowledge database.

In addition to being among  the industry’s most comprehensive database of government regulations and international business rules, Amber Road’s Global Knowledge is designed to automate Restricted Party Screening (RPS) processes to quickly vet customers, suppliers and other trading partners against 570+ restricted party lists sourced from government institutions worldwide.

Ty Bordner, VP of Solutions Consulting for Amber Road told LM in an interview that this initiative was customer driven.

“For a variety of reasons, there’s a lot of apprehension in the marketplace these days,” he says. “The consequences of doing business with the wrong people can be dire.”

To ensure that businesses do not engage in bribery to obtain or retain business, many countries around the world have passed anti-corruption laws, such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the UK Bribery Act, the Canadian Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, Chinese Anti-Corruption Laws and more.

Some of these laws do not distinguish between small and large bribery payments, thus prohibiting any facilitation payments. PEPscreening is a risk-assessment tool to help businesses protect themselves from the regulatory, reputational and economic risk associated with these types of laws.

A Politically Exposed Person is defined by the Financial Action Task Force as an individual who is or has been entrusted with a prominent public function. Due to their position and influence, it is recognized that many PEPs are in positions that potentially can be abused for the purpose of committing money laundering offenses and related predicate offenses, including corruption and bribery, as well as conducting activity related to terrorist financing.

“The addition of this comprehensive set of PEP lists to the screening process enhances our clients’ ability to mitigate the risk of doing business with people prone to corruption charges such as money laundering, bribery, terrorism financing and illegal drug smuggling,” says Bordner

The company’s Global Knowledge database includes tens of thousands of additional entities from more than 220 lists under PEP alone, covering more than 120 countries, captured using official government sources.

“This is exclusive information gathered by Amber Road,” Bordner adds.

Since PEPs generally present a higher risk for potential involvement in bribery and corruption due to their positions and the influence that they may hold, companies must be able to quickly identify individuals who may pose economic and reputational risk to their organizations. Given constant shifts in politics and leadership around the globe, identifying partners that poses high reputational risk is not static or straightforward.

Although persons or entities identified by PEP screening do not imply wrongdoing of any kind, PEPscreening against official governmental sourced information allows businesses to be fully informed and vigilant during their global decision making processes.

Bordner notes that that Global Knowledge integrates with Amber Road’s GTM “solutions,” while many other providers must have the content manually maintained during the execution of the transaction.

“With Global Knowledge, companies can realize significant productivity gains from eliminating this time-consuming task,” he says.