Let’s talk about financial services and linked accounts today. 

What are linked accounts? – Those are accounts that belong to your clients who are, for example, entities with common ownership or persons from the same family or otherwise clients that are connected or coordinate their activities when it comes to using your services.

Today, I will share with you some ideas on how to detect linked accounts, and what to do about accounts that are linked. 

Indication of possible linked accounts:

• email address with a unique domain, such as @mycompanyname.com (obviously, Gmail or Hotmail do not count)
• individuals who share residential addresses (be careful with legal entities, since there are so many co-working spaces today)
• the same device used to access a few different accounts
• shared directors, shareholders, or members of the management team
• shared payments options or funding options (e.g. withdrawals to the same wallet, funding from the same bank account, payments with the same credit card)
• frequent transactions with each other (especially in this is a high proportion of their total transactional volume)

What to do when you know you have linked accounts:

• Mark accounts as linked and document the reason for that.
• If you have transactional limits per customer, consider whether you apply those limits to the group of linked accounts (it’s possible that the very reason people open multiple accounts is to circumvent your limits).
• Watch specifically for signs of insider trading or market manipulation or otherwise for transactions that don’t make economic sense (e.g. buying services from your own company and paying with a credit card, selling items at a loss, etc).
• If there is an issue, a police report, a monitoring alert, a fraud, or a dispute case with one of the linked accounts, review all accounts that are linked (yes, bad people coordinate their efforts).

Talk soon!