Case Study: How TBC Bank Traces Ownership Across the Caucasus, Turkey, and the Gulf States
When your clients’ ownership chains run through Tbilisi, Istanbul, Dubai, and Nicosia, you need a tool that speaks every registry’s language.
The Challenge
TBC Bank is the largest financial institution in Georgia, serving corporate clients whose business structures reflect the region’s geography. A typical TBC corporate client might be incorporated in Georgia, majority-owned by a holding company registered in Turkey, with a controlling shareholder based in the UAE and secondary interests held through a Cypriot entity.
This is not deliberate obfuscation. It is how business works in the Caucasus and surrounding region. Cross-border holding structures are the norm for companies operating between the Georgian, Turkish, Gulf, and European markets. But for TBC Bank’s compliance team, this creates a specific problem: the National Bank of Georgia requires UBO identification to the same standard as any EU bank, while the ownership chains run through jurisdictions where registry access, data format, and language are fundamentally different.
Most global UBO providers are built for Western Europe and North America. They cover Companies House and the Luxembourg RBE well. But try resolving an ownership chain through the Turkish Trade Registry (MERSIS), the Georgian National Agency of Public Registry, and the UAE’s CBUAE — in Georgian, Turkish, and Arabic — and you hit a wall. TBC Bank’s compliance team was manually navigating five or six separate registries per client, translating documents, and stitching together ownership chains by hand.
The Solution
TBC Bank deployed Zavia.ai specifically for its strength in the jurisdictions where other providers are weakest.
How Zavia.ai works differently for TBC Bank:
- Caucasus-Turkey-Gulf registry access: Zavia.ai connects to the specific government registries that TBC’s compliance team actually needs: the Georgian National Agency of Public Registry, Turkey’s MERSIS, the UAE’s commercial registries, and Cyprus’s Companies Registry. This is not general “100+ country” coverage. It is targeted access to the exact jurisdictions where TBC’s clients’ ownership chains actually run.
- Multilingual ownership chain stitching: A single ownership chain for one TBC client might cross four languages. Zavia.ai processes Georgian, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, and Greek registry data and normalizes it into a single, consistent ownership map. The compliance team works with structured output in one view, regardless of how many languages the underlying registries use.
- FATF grey-list risk calibration: Turkey has been on and off the FATF grey list. Georgia itself was grey-listed until 2016. Zavia.ai applies dynamic risk calibration based on current FATF status, automatically triggering enhanced due diligence requirements for ownership chains that pass through grey-listed jurisdictions. When a jurisdiction’s FATF status changes, TBC’s screening rules update accordingly.
- Family group and conglomerate mapping: In the Caucasus and Turkish markets, many large businesses are family-controlled conglomerates where a single family holds interests across dozens of entities in different sectors. Zavia.ai maps these family group structures holistically, showing TBC Bank not just who owns one borrower but how that borrower connects to the family’s broader business empire.
The Results
| Metric | Before Zavia.ai | After Zavia.ai |
| Cross-border UBO resolution | Manual research across 5-6 registries per client | Automated end-to-end ownership mapping across all relevant jurisdictions |
| Language processing | Required analysts fluent in Georgian, Turkish, Russian, and Arabic | AI-processed and normalized multilingual registry data |
| FATF risk calibration | Static risk rules updated manually | Dynamic rules that adjust automatically to jurisdiction FATF status changes |
| Family conglomerate visibility | Fragmented — each entity assessed individually | Holistic group mapping showing all family-connected entities |
Why It Matters
TBC Bank competes with international banks that operate in the same region but assess clients against Western European compliance standards. The National Bank of Georgia expects TBC to match those standards. But TBC’s clients’ ownership chains run through jurisdictions that most Western UBO providers barely cover.
Zavia.ai closes that gap by providing registry access, multilingual processing, and AI-powered ownership resolution specifically for the jurisdictions where TBC operates. It is not a generic global tool. It is the tool that actually works where TBC Bank needs it.
Bottom line:
Zavia.ai gives TBC Bank AI-powered UBO resolution across the Caucasus, Turkey, and the Gulf — processing multilingual registry data, mapping family conglomerate structures, and applying dynamic FATF risk calibration for the specific jurisdictions where TBC’s clients actually do business.
