What is Entity Extraction and How Does It Fight Fraud?

In order for your business to succeed, it’s important to put safeguards in place to protect yourself from individuals or corporations that might seek to do you harm. Although it’s relatively easy to put physical safeguards in place, digital safeguards that protect against worldwide threats can be more difficult to enact. This is especially true when you consider the vast amounts of data that your business sends and receives on a daily basis. That’s why services, such as entity extraction, are absolutely vital for the security of your business.

Finding the Patterns

The key to entity extraction is finding patterns in data that seems random. Something as simple as a name in a single sentence in a letter can hold vital clues to the true identity of the sender of that letter. The main job of entity extraction is to comb through your vast data resources to find patterns and similarities between different data sets. Similarities can include aliases, partial name matches, and other unique identifiers that would be difficult for a human to pick up on.

Creating Usable Data

Once patterns have been identified, it’s time for the next step of entity extraction: creating usable data. This data needs to be in a format that is understandable by both humans and computers so that it can be accessed as needed to help prevent fraud. Whether this is a customized database, a standardized spreadsheet, or some other file format, the entity extraction software will work until all of the data has been synthesized and organized.

Applying the Data

Simply having organized data isn’t enough to fight fraud. After all, you can be looking at the name of an individual and have no idea that they’re involved in an international money laundering scheme. This is where the fraud-fighting capabilities of entity extraction software truly shine. With access to online data bases of known criminals, it will be easy to identify if you’re doing business with anyone that poses a threat. This will allow you to alert the proper authorities and freeze the accounts of the suspect individuals.

Enhanced Safeguards

As you move forward with your entity extraction software, it’s comforting to know that the safeguards don’t end once your existing data has been used to fight fraud. The software will continually synthesize new information as it comes in to check for any possible problems. Plus, the software will check for new threats to see if any existing data needs to be flagged.

Don’t Go It Alone

Trying to perform entity extraction in-house would be an overwhelming undertaking. When you consider the amount of information that your business has access to, it quickly becomes clear that you can’t spend the resources required to fight fraud without help. Fortunately, with a good entity extraction solution in place, you will be able to keep your business safe with almost no effort.

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