Performing 314(a) Searches

FinCEN’s 314a Program, based on Section 314(a) of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, requires certain financial institutions to search their records for accounts and transactions of entities that may be involved in terrorism or money laundering. Every two weeks, FinCEN sends these financial institutions a request with names of people and businesses that authorities are actively investigating. For more information, please see the FinCEN website. 

Synctera’s 314(a) search functionality allows you to upload the biweekly 314(a) request that you receive from FinCEN, so that you can determine if any of the included entities are customers of your FinTech partners or have had active accounts at your FinTech partners in the last 12 months. Because Synctera supports cross-tenant search, you only have to upload the file once to search across all of your FinTech partners.

File requirements

A well-formatted file is required for Synctera to perform the search. There are two supported formats:

• For People Searches: A .csv file with at least ‘first_name’, ‘last_name’, and ‘tracking_number’ as column headers. Example here
• For Business Searches: A .csv file with at least ‘business_name’ and ‘tracking_number’ as column headers. Example here

Performing a search

1. From the Dashboard landing page, navigate to the ‘Operations’ section

2. In the ‘Operations’ section navigate to the ‘314(a) Search’ section 

3. On the ‘314(a) Search’ page click on the ‘Upload Section 314(a)’ button

4. Click on the ‘Select File’ button that appears

5. Select the file you’d like to upload

6. Click on the ‘Upload’ button that appears

7. The system will automatically search and bring up the possible matches on screen

8. By clicking on any of the rows you will be taken to the that customer/business profile

Reviewing a search

After each search has been completed, a new entry will be added to the run table that has the date the search was completed, the name of the file searched, and the number of matches for that search.

When you click on any of the rows you’ll be taken to the detailed search review page that will display all of the possible matches, their match date, FinCEN tracking number (from the uploaded file), name information, creation date (when they initially became a customer), current status, and related FinTech partner.

When you click on any of the matches you will be brought to their customer information page.

Videos

People Search

Business Search

Things to note

In order to meet FinCEN standards, Synctera does not save the file or the full contents of the file once the search has been performed.