The British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA) has launched a ‘sanctions checking facility’ which will help brokers and insurers in screening their clients.
Currently under the Terrorism Act, it is an FSA requirement for any insurer or broker to ensure every client is not on an HM Treasury (HMT) list which identifies people involved in terrorism. Companies are also required to re-check this list every time the list is updated.
Until now, this screening process was sporadic, often neglected, and varied from company to company. The new BIBA system aims to provide an industry wide method.
The new system, named Sanctions Search, will enable BIBA members to upload their client data and have it automatically checked against the HMT List. Through the facility members will be provided with a robust audit trail to allow them to ‘evidence’ and ‘demonstrate’ that they have initially checked that their clients are not on the list. The facility will also ensure that when any changes are made to the list, users’ client data will automatically be rescreened, at no additional cost, to ensure that this remains the case.
“BIBA frequently receives calls from members telling us of the difficulties they are encountering when screening their clients to ensure that their customers are not target names,” said Steve Foulsham, BIBA Head of Technical Services.
“To overcome this, the new facility provides a cost-effective, automated financial sanctions screening service to provide members with peace of mind.”
The facility is being partly funded by BIBA and competitive rates have been negotiated on behalf of members. All members will be pre-registered including a number of ‘free’ search credits.
BIBA members will be contacted by Sanctions Search shortly providing the relevant information to enable them to activate the facility and to discuss costs for individual brokers. The current pricing structure is based on blocks of 150 of search ‘credits’, with one search credit translating to about one client screening. 150 credits will cost members £10, but the first 150 will be free.
