How ‘knowing your customer’ can help protect national borders"

It’s the job of border security staff around the world to keep their borders safe 24/7. And we’re not just talking about airports here. It’s about coastlines too, along with additional physical links such as the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. 

The job involves gathering intelligence, searching baggage, vehicles and cargo, and checking the immigration status of people arriving or departing – all in real time and during periods of heightened security threat and risk. Talk about multi-tasking. 

But it’s not just these day-to-day responsibilities which are at play here. Any nation seeking to grow its economy must have its doors wide open to potential investors and visitors from overseas, balanced with a focus on preventing those who wish to cause harm from gaining entry.

In other words, there’s an awful lot of pressure resting on the shoulders of the border security staff, who most of us normally see for fleeting moments at passport control when returning from holiday or a work trip.

The phrase “Know Your Customer” (KYC) is extremely common in financial services circles for financial crime detection. In essence, it’s an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) process that confirms a customer is who they say they are, taking into account risk levels and business activities. ‘Customer Due Diligence’ (CDD) takes this a step further to use information to assess types of activity or behaviour and any associated risks to it. Ultimately, both approaches are common for helping those seeking to invest or do business, while quickly identifying and deterring those who seek to do harm.

We believe that this approach is equally applicable at the borders. To truly know their customer (i.e. travellers), border security staff need to be able to:

• Identify unknown entities of interest and new patterns and trends
• Understand the holistic risk and threat assessment to inform priorities
• Develop innovative ways to rapidly create and access these essential insights

The good news is that the power of technology and data analytics are helping to turn this vision into reality. Indeed, digital capabilities can help make a decision to prevent someone or something boarding a plane, train, or boat anywhere around the world.

As you might expect, governments are constantly conducting risk assessments on travellers and incoming freight. Over recent years, systems have seen an explosion in data volumes – the UK alone gets more than 135 million passenger arrivals each year, with each passenger generating a complex matrix of data points. 

Today, governments have access to new data analytics capabilities for real-time risk assessment spanning cross-border movement of people and freight – fusing data from across government entities with that of commercial organisations to enable intelligence-led risk assessments. 

Such capability is critical for a modern data analytics service which can address priorities ranging from reducing threats to facilitating the legitimate flow of traffic, from identifying previously undetectable offences to making the prioritisation of resources more efficient. And, as with organisations in all industries, it’s a necessary transformation – futureproofing critical national services against the dual threat of an ever-expanding risk landscape and an unstoppable wave of increasing data volume in which threat actors seek to hide themselves. 

Clearly, technology and data only work as part of a constellation of different approaches at the border. But it’s also increasingly evident that data has a crucial role to play in helping border security staff know their customer, both good and bad. That’s how we can ensure that international borders and societies remain secure and protected.