Are Chinese names creating a gap in your compliance programme?

Watch the Dow Jones & Logica webinar here.

Renminbi (RMB) denominated transactions are growing with the rate of growth accelerating. Standard Chartered figures show that in February 2012, 17.6% of Singapore’s trade with China/Hong Kong was settled in RMB. Chinese banks are a major source of liquidity for the Asia region, financing many large infrastructure projects across the region. Project finance specialists say it will be a matter of time before many of those projects are denominated in RMB.

With Chinas economy now the world’s second largest and a key driver of global growth, banks are finding that their RMB business is growing. This is leading to an increase in the number of incoming financial messages containing CCCs. Chinese Commercial Codes (CCC) were originally used for transmitting Chinese text over electronic telegraph. However, for non-Chinese speaking countries, there is still a need to identify a Chinese person's name without using Chinese Characters. CCCs are used by some countries in visa and immigration applications and they also occur in financial messages to communicate Chinese names when the Chinese characters themselves cannot be present.

Regulators are taking an interest in potential gaps in sanctions compliance from not scanning CCCs. The problem extends to payments, FX and trade finance all of which may contain CCCs. If a bank is only scanning Latin names on regulatory watch lists, it may inadvertently accept or make payments to a sanctioned entity.

Real-time filtering of financial messages against sanctions lists is crucial in any bank. Therefore, Logica in conjunction with Dow Jones, has created an informative and interesting Webinar looking at how Chinese names could be creating a gap in your compliance programme. From providing an overview of the challenge through to how banks can look to solve this issue, this Webinar is free for you to view here.

If you would like to speak to our real-time sanctions filtering expert, please contact John Evans.
John.o.evans@logica.com