BenScan
Beneficiary risk profiling — verify a payee and quantify risk against UK registers
BenScan looks up a beneficiary or payee against an offline corpus of Companies House and FCA register data — and scans the open web — then quantifies risk from a series of explainable signals. In active development.
Register Interest
What BenScan does
BenScan is bigspark's beneficiary risk profiling product. It resolves a payee or beneficiary name to the closest regulated entity, then scores the risk of that beneficiary from a set of explainable signals drawn from authoritative UK registers — turning a Confirmation-of-Payee check into a risk decision, not just a name match.
Beneficiary lookup
resolves a payee or beneficiary name to the closest regulated entity using name-embedding similarity search over UK registers.
Explainable risk score
quantifies risk from signals covering company status and age, ownership opacity, regulatory authorisation and name-similarity, with the contributing signals attached to every verdict.
Open-web intelligence
augments the register data with open-source signals from across the web (consumer reviews, forums such as Reddit, Which? and news) to build a fuller intelligence picture of the beneficiary.
Confirmation-of-Payee ready
an exact match to a healthy, authorised entity is a trust signal; a close-but-not-exact match flags impersonation risk; no match is neutral.
Offline and governed
runs against a curated offline copy of Companies House and the FCA Financial Services Register (self-cross-referencing via the Companies House number), so checks are fast, private and auditable.
How it works
Look up
normalise the beneficiary name and find the closest regulated entities by embedding similarity.
Gather signals
read corporate-health, ownership, regulatory and identity signals from the matched register record.
Scan the open web
gather open-source intelligence (consumer reviews, forums, news) on the matched entity to enrich the register signals.
Score and explain
combine the signals into a risk band, keeping every contributing signal attached so the score is explainable and auditable.
Feed the investigation
expose the verdict to Kai and Fraud Autoinvestigate as a callable check.
Part of the financial-crime stack
BenScan sits beside SparkScan on the same register foundation: SparkScan resolves and enriches your customer data, BenScan verifies and scores the beneficiary, and Kai and Fraud Autoinvestigate turn those signals into investigations and decisions. One shared, offline register substrate; every step explainable and auditable.
Beneficiary risk profiling, built on the registers
Confirmation of Payee tells you whether a name matches. BenScan goes further: it tells you whether the beneficiary behind that name is one you should trust. It resolves the payee to the closest regulated entity across an offline corpus of Companies House and the FCA Financial Services Register, then quantifies risk from signals derived both from that register data and from a scan of the open web.
- Identity & match — exact vs close-but-not-exact match to a known regulated entity (the classic impersonation signal).
- Corporate health — company status (active / dissolved / liquidation), age, and filing health.
- Ownership & control — ownership opacity, undeclared or offshore persons of significant control, shared officers and reused addresses.
- Regulatory — FCA authorisation status and consistency of the FCA firm’s Companies House number.
- Open-web intelligence — consumer reviews, forum discussion (e.g. Reddit), Which? and news, surfacing reputation and complaint signals the registers don’t capture.
Every score carries its contributing signals, so a “risk” verdict is always explainable — the standard regulated financial-crime work demands.
In active development
BenScan is the newest product in bigspark’s financial-crime stack. The register data foundation and name-matching are built; the explainable signal-scoring layer is in active development.
Awards and Honours
