Investar Bank strengthens due diligence and fraud investigations with CLEAR

Executive summary

A full-service community bank headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Investar Bank operates across three states — Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama. With a customer mix that is roughly evenly split between personal and business banking, the bank supports a broad range of consumer, commercial, and industrial relationships.

Investar Bank started using Thomson Reuters CLEAR in late 2018 to improve the depth and efficiency of its due diligence and investigative work. Before CLEAR, the team relied on several ancillary systems, including a competitor's product, to research customers and businesses. With CLEAR, Investar Bank now supports daily due diligence reviews on new customers, investigates suspicious activity, performs reverse phone and vehicle lookups, and strengthens fraud and AML investigations with more actionable information in a single platform.

Consolidating due diligence into a single platform

Before adopting CLEAR, Investar Bank’s compliance team faced a fragmented and inefficient due diligence process. “We were using several ancillary systems at the time, including a competitor’s product that I really wasn’t happy with the level of detail it was providing us for the investigation and due diligence process,” explains David Owens, Director of Financial Intelligence at Investar Bank.

At the same time, the bank needed a more efficient way to support a growing range of investigative demands. David Owens' team is responsible for reviewing AML alerts, monitoring high-risk customers, supporting fraud investigations, and assessing new customer relationships for potential risk. The team also receives requests from other departments across the bank, including corporate security, to investigate suspicious vehicles, suspicious individuals, and spam or spoofed phone calls targeting customers.

Without a more unified and information-rich solution, these processes required too much manual effort and made it harder to identify risks early. For a bank focused on preventing losses and making informed relationship decisions, that created both operational and risk management challenges.

CLEAR helps unify due diligence and investigative workflows

Investar Bank selected CLEAR in late 2018 after a live demonstration showed the team the depth of information available on known problem customers. Owens recognized its potential immediately.

Better risk identification, more efficient reviews, and stronger fraud prevention

Since implementing CLEAR, Investar Bank has improved both the efficiency and effectiveness of its due diligence and fraud investigation processes. By consolidating research into a more capable platform, the bank reduced its reliance on multiple systems and gained access to more detailed information for investigating both individuals and businesses.

One of the biggest benefits has been the ability to identify potential risks earlier in the customer lifecycle. Owens explained that when the team identifies a concern in a new customer review, they can monitor the account closely and often detect suspicious activity soon afterward. That early visibility helps the bank act before losses occur. For him, these are the things that define success — catching something before it happens and stopping it.

The accuracy of CLEAR’s data has proven highly reliable — primary hits for addresses, phone numbers, and criminal records have been consistently precise, with minimal false positives. Owens shared, “For the most part, what we’re seeing as the primary hits for address, phone number, criminal records, it’s been spot on.”

Beyond onboarding and fraud reviews, CLEAR also helps strengthen the bank's suspicious activity reporting. By enabling the team to gather more detailed information on the individuals involved in fraudulent schemes, the platform helps Investar Bank provide more useful narratives for law enforcement and improve the long-term value of its investigative reporting.

Looking ahead, David Owens also sees opportunity in CLEAR Investigate, which he expects could reduce review times from hours to minutes by summarizing relevant findings and surfacing key details — such as the meaning of criminal statutes — without requiring analysts to leave the platform.

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