Name matching technology significantly reduces false positive alerts in watchlist screening on anything-to-anything currency exchange platform

Oct. 19, 2021 — Uphold — a digital money platform for foreign exchange and remittances between crypto and traditional currencies — has chosen Rosette^® by BasisTech to screen its financial transactions against watchlists. Rosette is the AI-powered name matching technology of choice for watchlist screening at major traditional financial institutions. Bringing in Rosette enables Uphold to shorten customer onboarding and reduce its risk of inadvertently transacting business with sanctioned individuals.

“Before Rosette, we were getting a lot of false positives, which translates to hundreds of thousands of alerts for our compliance team to investigate, leading to delays during sign-up,” said Chris Adjei-Ampofo, CIO of Uphold. “Our market is so volatile that users want to sign up and trade immediately. If they miss a favorable opportunity, that is a poor customer experience and a reputation hit.

“We chose Rosette because it improves the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of our screening, and keeps us compliant with sanctions regulations and free from incurring hefty fines. But the real value of Rosette is delivering a seamless customer experience for good customers, whilst protecting Uphold by flagging bad actors.”

Uphold delivers anything-to-anything transactions across 80-plus currencies and in 184-plus countries, so that users can make everyday purchases with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Uphold acts as the intermediary to seamlessly convert crypto to the local currency of customers.

Integrating Rosette into Uphold to check new accounts and periodically rescreen accounts against watchlists has significantly reduced the number of false alerts, resulting in frictionless customer onboarding.

“We are excited to partner with an innovator like Uphold, which is using Rosette to solve problems that haven’t yet been solved for cryptocurrencies,” said Catherine Havasi, Chief Product Officer at BasisTech.

Name matching technology from Rosette has AI algorithms that know how names vary in multiple languages. Every name comparison produces a match confidence score that is consistent and explainable to financial regulators, and enables the institution to automatically respond to each match according to its risk policy.

About Uphold
Uphold is an easy-to-use investments and payments app. Specialising in digital assets, we serve more than 7 million customers in 184-plus countries. We provide consumers with a more versatile and cost-effective home for their daily financial lives. For businesses, we provide regulated infrastructure to connect crypto with fiat currencies. Uphold’s unique trading experience — “anything-to-anything” — allows customers to trade directly between any supported asset or currency in one step. To learn more, please visit www.uphold.com.

About BasisTech

Data analytics and machine learning are critical to verifying identity, understanding customers, anticipating world events, and uncovering crime. BasisTech provides businesses and governments with advanced analytics and AI-powered solutions for deriving insights from multilingual text, connecting data silos, and discovering digital evidence. Our Rosette text analytics platform employs classical machine learning and deep neural nets to extract meaningful information from unstructured data. Autopsy, our digital forensics platform, and Cyber Triage, our incident response tool, serve the needs of law enforcement, national security, and legal technologists. KonaSearch delivers deep search across Salesforce and other data sources.

Company headquarters are in Somerville, Mass., with offices in Washington, D.C., London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. For more information, visit basistech.com.