Joy Henry, EVP, Americas
Fingerprinting in Financial Services: 3 Key Reasons It’s Essential
As a leader in the financial services industry, you’re already required under applicable laws to run fingerprint-based FBI-database background screening on some of your employees. That’s good from a compliance perspective — but compliance alone may no longer be enough.
Here are three key reasons financial services firms should seek expansion of their fingerprinting program(s)s to a broader base of employees.
Reason 1: Increased risk mitigation
There’s a lot of noise out there about which type of background checks are superior: name-based or fingerprint-based background checks. From our extensive experience in background screening, we know there’s value in both. Here are two scenarios that reinforce our recommendation of doing both for companies that operate in the financial services industry:
- Company-Specific Job Requirements – Federal regulations requiring fingerprint-based FBI database searches for specific financial positions are built on a general understanding of certain roles within the financial sector. These regulations are intended to protect the interests of consumers and serve as a base requirement. Financial organizations may find it necessary to seek permission to expand the scope of criminal searches to include fingerprint-based checks for specific internal job functions to help mitigate risk for the organization and consumers. Adding fingerprint-based criminal checks as a matter of internal policy can help strengthen the scope of your background checks by increasing the sources of criminal records searched.
- Brand Protection – Nothing shakes consumer confidence quite like an internal company scandal, especially when investor money is involved. The past two decades have seen some of the worst financial scandals in history. When fraud does occur, one of the most impactful consequences is reputational loss and diminished trust in the market, the significance of which can go well beyond any fines incurred. Seeking approval to perform fingerprint-based background checks for a broader base of employees at a financial organization adds an extra layer of due diligence that can help protect your brand.
Reason 2: Consistency in hiring
While federal regulations set requirements for screening specific roles with fingerprint-based checks to protect consumer interests, financial services firms should still review the responsibilities of each role they hire with a goal of establishing a background check policy that defines consistent screening requirements for similar functions. Matching background checks (including fingerprint-based FBI-database criminal checks) to the unique responsibilities for different positions and levels within the organization is an essential step in forming a screening policy that is fair and consistent and protects the organization’s interests. Creating consistent screening requirements has the added benefit of:
- Creating clearer expectations around qualifications for specific roles
- Promoting fairness when considering candidates for similar roles
- Helping to inject repeatability in your background screening process, especially when role-specific screening packages are established with your screening partner
Defining consistent screening requirements across your job functions also can give you a different perspective from which to evaluate your screening partner. You want to be sure your partner is positioned to support your candidates in all aspects of your program. For fingerprint-based criminal checks, this means selecting an organization with excellent customer service, a large network of fingerprinting locations, and capabilities to support all aspects of your fingerprinting needs, including FINRA, FBI and NMLS checks.
Reason 3: It’s never been easier
If you’ve resisted increasing the roles you fingerprint for before because of a sub-optimal experience, there’s good news: it’s improved, a lot.
In the past, most fingerprinting was done in law enforcement offices by people who, though they were trained to capture good prints, may not have delivered the best customer experience. Fingerprinting done outside of law enforcement offices often tended to be in inconvenient locations like a bail bonds company or even in the back room of a restaurant. The process was in some cases quite frequently awkward and uncomfortable.
It’s different now.
Today, law enforcement is no longer the go-to place for public fingerprint collection. In fact, some local law enforcement agencies no longer provide public fingerprinting services to help reduce their administrative burden, and some states, such as Colorado, have implemented legislation that removes law enforcement entirely from non-criminal fingerprinting processes.
This move has left a rather sizeable hole in the fingerprinting market that companies have rushed to fill, and where there’s competition, there’s innovation. Most fingerprinting service organizations now offer live scan fingerprinting, which captures an electronic version of prints to send directly to the screening organization. More importantly, the competition has spurred an improvement in customer service, so your candidates wait less and get better assistance than ever before. And with customers posting Yelp and Google reviews of their fingerprinting locations, the pressure to offer quality customer service is only increasing.
So, if you haven’t looked at the fingerprinting experience in a while — and if you’re still using the same old process you used a few years ago — maybe it’s time you looked at what the modern, efficient fingerprinting experience is like. The candidate fingerprinting experience should no longer be a point of concern that prevents companies from seeking permission to perform fingerprint-based criminal searches for roles with high levels of responsibility.
What are you waiting for?
Ready to find out how easy it is to run fingerprint-based background checks on your employees? First Advantage’s national fingerprinting network offers clean, well-lit, customer-friendly locations in hundreds of cities across the U.S. We can handle FINRA and non-FINRA checks for you, and we can even host our state-of-the-art fingerprinting kiosk in a central location for larger organizations who need one. Have questions? We’d love to hear from you!
Contact us for a customized solution that suits your needs.
