Industry’s most powerful suite of configurable analytical tools: RDC

The Silicon Review

RDC,The Diligence Technology Company, is the world’s leading Anti-Money Laundering,Know Your Customer, Anti-Bribery & Corruption solutions provider. RDC integrates the industry’s largest financial crime diligence database into an agile SaaS technology platform that minimizes the number of false positives, provides accurate alerts, and protects its clients from regulatory risks. Compliance and risk departments of Fortune 100 and small to medium size companies rely on RDC’s risk diligence expertise and industry knowledge to safeguard them from regulatory fines and reputational damage. RDC is a trusted partner that works with regulated organizations both domestically and globally to provide fully customized diligence solutions based on their individual needs, risk tolerance, and business requirements.

A conversation with Tom Obermaier, CEO

Why was the company set up? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?
RDC was conceived of and developed by 20 of the world’s largest financial institutions to harness the power of public source data for regulatory compliance. It remains a compliance firm, run by compliance executives, that enables clients to evaluate & manage counter party risk, including financial regulatory compliance, reputational risk, community trust & safety protection, and supply chain assurance.

Tell us about your core product that was launched?
Our risk diligence database, GRID, is the largest of its kind – roughly three times the size of any competitor. It contains all the relevant economic sanctions lists and over 500+watch lists from various government and multi-national agencies around the world. It also contains the world’s largest collection of PEPs, from 240 countries. The PEP collection is rated based on a proprietary system derived from functional role, sovereign country rating, public corruption ratings, known associates and connections, and negative events or rumors.

What kind of mixed responses have you received from your consumers over the years?
Businesses are finding real value with RDC’s comprehensive solutions. Example: A financial services firm was using a compliance management solution that gave them a 99 percent false positive rate for the checks they were performing. The firm had just completed an acquisition, doubling the organization size and bringing the headache of even more false positives to review. After approaching RDC and buying ourGRID solution, the firm found that RDC, while handling twice the amount of volume of their competitor, had 90 percent fewer false positives.

What do you feel are the reasons behind your product popularity?
RDC is an unrivaled managed screening service provider. The following facts leave us standing alone atop the field:

Our solution is the only integrated data-analytics-technology-human analyst platform, affording both unmatched protection and heretofore unseen efficiency RDC maintains the largest risk relevant screening database, nearly 3 times the size of our nearest competitor and an unmatched collection of economic sanctions, government watch lists, PEPs and adverse media.
Only industry profiles replete with riskographies, risk event annotations, and risk bibliographies.
Only screening solution including original source material with its alerts.
Matching and filtering capabilities without peer. Multi-dimensional matching capabilities combined with configurable filtering along 9 parameters significantly enhance alert productivity
World-renowned false positive reduction machine, utilizing industry leading analysts to enhance superior technological outcomes.
Daily monitoring of complete client bases to avoid wasteful updating processes
Only provider with a continuous improvement loop, combining machine learning with client and analyst feedback to continuously improve client productivity.

Are there any trigger factors that have played key roles in shaping your organization’s road map?
Our clients, who over the last six years adopted and transformed RDC’s solution. Their vision and commitment to excellence, both in terms of protecting the financial system and reducing micro and macro inefficiencies, drives everything RDC does.

Do you have any new products ready to be rolled out into the market?
RDC is never finished building. We recently enhanced GRID by incorporating data straight from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the publisher of the entire Panama Papers document dump, offering clients an even more robust solution. And we are working towards creating real time solutions that will combine transactional data at financial institutions and other data from open sources to make a more predictive model.

Where do you see you and your company a couple of years from now?
The industry has seen RDC embrace Big Data and machine learning, allowing our analysts and clients to get better results. The next wave is going to include cognitive processing, and we are poised to lead this new effort.

Meet the Master

Tom Obermaier, CEO: Tom has served as the Chief Executive Officer for RDC for more than five years. During his tenure,RDC’s revenue has grown more than 40 times (40x) through the implementation of an industry leading SaaS platform that delivers solutions tailored around the world’s largest financial crime diligence database. Prior to joining RDC, he was the Chief Risk Officer for Citigroup’s Global Transaction Services, a wholesale supplier of banking, security and risk services to financial institutions, governments and corporate clients worldwide.

Tom is an internationally recognized expert on risk matters, particularly regulatory risk and systemic issues surrounding payments and securities settlements. A founding member of the international regulatory council, the Wolfsberg Group, Tom was one of the industry’s first advocates of extending risk management fundamentals to the regulatory compliance arena.

‘To learn more about RDC, visit www.rdc.com’