Customer data is a bit like a jigsaw: pieces of the same customer profile are often scattered across your CRM, onboarding system, and your payments data. Screen all of those names against a watchlist and you’re likely to get back a flood of false alerts. Piece the fragments together before screening so you have one version of each customer, and you leave much less to chance. OpenSanctions has teamed up with Berlin-based [Tilores](https://tilores.io/), which provides real-time entity resolution to resolve duplicate, conflicting records scattered across systems. Their desktop tool for entity resolution, [Tilores Studio](https://tilores.io/download), can now screen a whole customer list against OpenSanctions and, in local mode, customer data never leaves your machine. ## The richest combination of what you know Most customer lists describe the same person several times, each record with its own spelling, address, or missing date of birth. If you screen those records one by one, you’ll get repeat alerts for the same person, each judged on a partial picture, with nothing connecting them. Resolving first means that each real customer is screened once, using the richest combination of what you know about them: a fuller name form, a date of birth, or a country can turn a borderline hit into a clear match or a clear non-match. > "You can't be confident in a sanctions check if you're only screening one version of a customer,” says Steven Renwick, Tilores’ CEO. “Entity resolution means that before anyone is checked against OpenSanctions data, every record you hold on them, in every system, has been brought together. You're not hoping you caught them. You know you did." ## How to get started 1. First, download Tilores Studio for free from [https://tilores.io/download](https://tilores.io/download) 2. Create a new profile and select whether you want to use a person or company schema. *Note: For the local evaluation version of Tilores, the schema and matching rules are fixed.* 3. Go to the “Batch” section and ingest a CSV of customer or company records from one or multiple sources into Tilores Studio. The software will match the duplicates and link the related records, then lets you inspect the resolved entities:
Tilores Studio: a Venn diagram indicating the overlap of three data sources
4. Then take the next step: screen those entities against OpenSanctions' open-source dataset of sanctions, PEPs, and other entities of risk. Tilores will automatically detect OpenSanctions data and create the recommended data mapping.Tilores Studio automatically detects OpenSanctions data
Tilores Studio showing initial screening results against OpenSanctions data
5. The tool doesn’t just flag hits for you to review, but highlights data changes since you last imported the sanctions lists, so you’ll be able to see which matches changed since the last run.A re-run of a sanctions list screening, indicating what changed since the last run
## How it runs Tilores Studio can be used locally for evaluations using both real and synthetic data, including screening using OpenSanctions data. However, to use Tilores entity resolution in production, most users are recommended to run Tilores on serverless cloud-based infrastructure, either in Tilores’ or their own hosting environment. In the cloud-based version of Tilores, the schema and matching rules can be configured to your own requirements. Thanks to the scalability of serverless technology, you can run thousands of screenings in parallel across millions of customer or company records. Companies can either upload OpenSanctions data manually on a regular basis or, if they hold an API license, connect the OpenSanctions API to the Tilores API to automate the process for real-time sanctions alerting. ## A layer to build upon OpenSanctions was designed as an open-source building block that can integrate into screening workflows, investigation tools, and products serving regulated industries. Friedrich Lindenberg, founder of OpenSanctions, says: > "We don't try to be the whole compliance stack, but a data resource that can be built on top of and expanded. Fintechs and platform builders can combine OpenSanctions with the tools they already use, or integrate it into their stack, and Tilores Studio is a great example of how well that works.” **Join us on November 5 for a LinkedIn Live session with Steven and Friedrich, where they’ll be discussing what it takes to keep the world's sanctions, watchlist, and PEP data clean and usable. Steven will also walk you through how to screen an entire customer dataset against OpenSanctions using Tilores Studio.** Register on LinkedIn [here](https://www.linkedin.com/events/7513516994420174849/)