Chinese Commercial Codes (CCC), also known as Chinese Telegraph Codes (CTC) were originally used for transmitting Chinese text over telegraph wires. A series of numbers is used to represent the different Chinese characters. Today, they are used to identify a name of a Chinese person or company without using Chinese Characters, very often in bank payment, FX and trade finance descriptions. As the names on a “watch list” are usually listed in native or Latin script only, a name written with CCC/CTC may be accepted despite being on a “watch list.” More and more regulators view ignoring CCC/CTC as a gap in compliance.
A top international bank in the Asia Pacific region asked LinguaSys how to streamline the operation of looking up CCC names and reduce the costs of each transaction. LinguaSys sat down with the customer to make sure that our proposed solution would be suitable and had the proper acceptance criteria and human oversight to ensure high quality. Using the capabilities of our Carabao technology for both transliteration and translation, we built a solution that first turns the set of numeric codes into the appropriate Chinese characters, and then we used the translation capability to translate those Chinese characters into a business or person’s name. Both steps are displayed prominently on the web based application so that the human involved can verify accuracy, and take the necessary steps if an error occurs. The number of transactions that can be handled per minute has risen without any sacrifice in accuracy.