Reputation

The Importance Of Reputation Management For Politically Exposed Persons

Article Image February 7, 2019

Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) require specialized reputation management support due to the nature of their public function. These individuals include senior government officials, high ranking military personnel, political party leaders, heads of state, and more. For PEPs, any business relationships with close associates and family members carry significant reputational risk.

PEPs present two types of risks. These include:

  • Reputational risk — if poorly managed, this risk can affect the reputation of an organization, including political parties and private or state-run entities. This is due to the perception that an organization may derive undue benefits from the association.
  • Transactional risk — PEPs may play a role in facilitating payments in return for donations (in-kind or monetary) or other unlawful rewards.

Fortunately, politically exposed person reputation management services can help assess and manage PEP risk professionally. This can be achieved from a contextual perspective or a case-by-case basis. The former places emphasis on various aspects of information and circumstances. Conversely, the latter focuses on the level of exposure to determine due diligence and risk mitigation activities required.

Validating PEP screening results

It is possible to validate or discount PEP alerts based on various criteria, including name matching, PEP identification, profiling, and geography. Companies and compliance analysts will find the validation highly useful. Reputation management agencies can handle different types of assessments with the aim of positively identifying specific individuals. A PEP can be linked to a specific location, organization, and other variables.

The majority of financial institutions consider politically exposed persons as potential compliance risks. For this reason, they perform enhanced monitoring of active accounts. The screening process is typically conducted at the account opening stage as part of the know your customer (KYC) checks. The accounts are also periodically assessed as part of ongoing due diligence.

Our top ranked reputation management agency can handle PEP reputational risk screening. The process can be time-consuming as it entails checking various aspects, including demographic details, location, names, identification numbers, and more. Some of the data used during the risk screening process is available via crowdsourced lists of politically exposed persons. Establishing the nature of the business conducted by third-party intermediaries is a key step in the analysis of PEP risk analysis.

Familiarizing with the PEP status

Reputation management professionals can help individuals identify people considered as politically exposed persons. For example, some compliance requirements may not consider a nephew or niece of a politically exposed person as a PEP. However, the brother of a person with a PEP designation shares the same status.

Additionally, a step-child of PEP may not be regarded as a family member. However, this is not the case if the step-child was legally adopted. On the other hand, a close associate is defined as any individual with close links to a politically exposed person for various reasons, including personal or business engagements. It is important to note that the term close associate is not designed to identify everyone who has links to the PEP.

Politically exposed person reputation management Service Offerings from South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East, & Anywhere in the World

Reputation management services provided by The Reputation Management Company here help protect PEPs by constantly monitoring the internet and other media for mentions. In addition, online campaigns can help PEPs demonstrate high levels of transparency, which is aimed at dislodging any incorrect links to specific individuals or organizations.

In some cases, crowdsourced lists of PEPs may contain incorrect information about politically exposed persons. Such information can be damaging to the reputation of the PEP. Experts can detect, validate and help remove or correct the information. In some cases, legal action may be taken against publishers of incorrect PEP data.

Successful online reputation management (ORM) involves proper control of information flows with the aim to protect the image of a politically exposed person. It can also deal with the unwanted appearance of confidential data on the web. ORM agencies offer a range of solutions designed to safeguard the reputation of politicians and businesspeople. Any defamatory content is removed from the internet.

PEPs can advantage of expert advice to avoid compromising their reputation online and offline. We can even fix and change negative autocomplete suggestions on Google, Yandex, Bing, Baidu, and other search engines agencies can also use advanced tools to monitor information across the internet, including social media, databases, news sites, and wikis. This allows prominent individuals to ensure that their reputation is not damaged by any data sources.

Reputation Management