AWS Big Data Blog

Enhancing Identity Intelligence with Babel Street Match and Amazon OpenSearch

This post is co-authored with Gil Irizarry, Mae Wells-Kress and Craig Harmon from Babel Street. 

Can your system tell “John Smith” apart from “John Smith”?

Organizations requiring identity intelligence increasingly face challenges due to complexity of matching names and entities across vast, multilingual, and constantly evolving datasets. Whether helping border security, combating financial crimes, or maintaining regulatory compliance, the accuracy of identity and entity resolution directly determines whether threats are detected, investigations succeed, and regulatory requirements are met. Yet, linguistic diversity, transliterations, inconsistent data formats, and legacy system limitations continue to create friction, leading to false positives, missed matches, and costly manual reviews. As customers ingest and analyze petabytes of unstructured and structured data in Amazon OpenSearch Service, the need for intelligent, scalable, and multilingual matching becomes increasingly important. This is where the integration of Babel Street (an AWS Partner) with OpenSearch Service provides a solution that helps organizations enhance precision, reduce noise, and accelerate insights from their high-volume data environments.

This post explores how combining Babel Street Match with OpenSearch Service provides a solution that helps your organization to handle large-scale, multilingual data.

The growing complexity of identity and entity resolution

As organizations ingest and analyze massive volumes of multilingual and inconsistently formatted data, accurately matching names and entities becomes increasingly difficult. Variations in spelling, transliterations, semantic differences, cultural naming conventions, and incomplete or noisy records can contribute to mismatches. These challenges are compounded by legacy systems, fragmented data pipelines, operational inefficiencies, and evolving regulatory requirements—especially in sectors where precision is a requirement.

Evaluating and enhancing identity in high-volume enterprise environments

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed, scalable search and analytics service that enables organizations to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze massive volumes of data in near real time. Built to handle structured and unstructured information from diverse sources, it powers use cases ranging from security analytics and log monitoring to enterprise search and advanced analytical applications.

Babel Street delivers risk intelligence trusted by organizations across government, defense, and the private sector. The offering combines access to vast volumes of multilingual data with advanced analytics to uncover hidden identities, secure vendor networks, and identify emerging risks with precision, speed, and scale. From national security to regulatory compliance and enterprise resilience, Babel Street provides the strategic advantage needed to stay ahead of risk, safeguard operations, and protect missions.

Babel Street Match, an offering from Babel Street incorporates advanced identity risk intelligence capabilities, which enhance the precision and reliability of screening processes. This advanced solution uses sophisticated matching techniques to verify identities and identify variations in personal data—including aliases, alternate spellings, and differences in biographical details, helping organizations separate legitimate individuals from potential threats. The ability to screen names, addresses, dates, and other identifiers across different scripts and languages helps reduce false positives and negatives, helps accurately detect critical risks with transparent scoring to meet compliance and audit requirements. Further, Babel Street Match streamlines screening workflows, reduces the burden of manual reviews, and elevates the accuracy of threat detection.

The following diagram shows the details of OpenSearch Service and Babel Street Match Plugin integration.

Architecture diagram showing Babel Street Match Plugin integration with AWS services, including AWS Marketplace, Amazon S3, and Amazon OpenSearch Service across two AWS accounts for secure entity matching.

Babel Street Match integrates directly with the OpenSearch Service domain through a lightweight plugin that runs inside your own AWS account where you have full control of your data. The Match plugin sends encrypted match requests to Babel Street’s fully managed Match engine, where the core matching engine performs the entity-resolution logic. The results return to you in real time, enhancing your existing OpenSearch Service workflows with advanced name- and entity-matching capabilities. Meanwhile, Babel Street’s control plane handles licensing, monitoring, and AWS Marketplace integration behind the scenes, provides continuous validation, automated updates, and a seamless operational experience.

Example use cases

The solution combines enterprise-scale search and analytics with AI-powered, multilingual identity intelligence. This section showcases example use cases where integration has enhanced organizations’ capabilities.

  • Border Screening: Help agencies identify high-risk travelers, cargo, and networks to strengthen point-of-entry security with faster, automated risk assessment.
  • Financial Services Compliance: Help Financial institutions and the FinTechs that serve them by offering AI-driven solutions for name screening, adverse media monitoring, and know your customer (KYC)/know your vendor (KYV) due diligence.
  • Identity and Organization Screening: Help businesses needing identity and organization screening by providing AI, analytics, and advanced matching technologies to assist in addressing complex screening challenges.
  • Customer and Vendor Onboarding: Help governments and financial institutions by providing research, analytics, and advanced matching technologies needed to quickly and confidently onboard customers and vendors at scale.

Customer Success Stories

Here’s how leading organizations are leveraging Babel Street Match and Amazon OpenSearch Service to solve real-world identity challenges:

  • A European online brokerage faced AML (anti-money laundering) compliance challenges with its outdated name-matching system, which produced excessive false positives and couldn’t process longer multilingual names. After implementing Babel Street Match on OpenSearch Service, the firm achieved up to 70% better accuracy across 25 languages—significantly reducing manual work and speeding customer payments.
    Babel Street Match Improves FI’s Name-Matching Accuracy by Up to 70% on OpenSearch
  • A major border agency struggled with an outdated screening system that flagged 15% of travelers as potential watchlist matches—overwhelming agents and creating long queues. After implementing Babel Street Match, false positives dropped dramatically (from 80,000 to just 100 in one test), hardware needs fell by 70%, and travelers with common names can now pass through faster. As one stakeholder put it: “Name matching is not our biggest problem anymore.”
    Enabling Stronger, Safer Borders with AI-powered Screening by Babel Street Match

Getting Started with Babel Street Match for Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service supports third-party plugins like Babel Street Match for OpenSearch. This plugin is supported on OpenSearch version 2.15 or higher and licenses can be obtained through AWS Marketplace.

Installing Babel Street Match for Amazon OpenSearch Service

Prerequisites: Obtain the license file from Babel Street and upload it to an S3 bucket in the same AWS Region as your OpenSearch domain.

Installation Steps:

  1. Create packages – In the OpenSearch Service console, create a package for your license file and select the Babel Street Match plugin from the available options
  2. Associate packages – Link both the license and plugin packages to your OpenSearch domain
  3. Verify – Monitor the domain update and confirm the plugin is active

For details, refer to AWS documentation “Installing third-party plugins in Amazon OpenSearch Service” and Babel Street installation guide which provides detailed guidance on pre-requisites, installation and using the plugin.

Conclusion

Together, Babel Street Match and OpenSearch Service help organizations cut through false positives and catch true matches faster. The result? Greater precision, efficiency, and speed—whether protecting entities, maintaining compliance, or securing supply chains. That’s business-critical identity intelligence in action.

Explore how Babel Street Match on Amazon OpenSearch Service can elevate your organization’s identity intelligence capabilities and transform the screening operations through an interactive or customized demo on Babel Street’s website.

Portions of this content describing Babel Street products and services are provided by Babel Street. AWS is not responsible for the accuracy of third-party product information.

About the Authors

Kunal Sharma

Kunal Sharma is a Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS. He works with AWS Worldwide Public Sector (WWPS) partners to build and scale cloud-native solutions. As an SA, he thrives on turning complex customer challenges into elegant, well-architected solutions — one whiteboard session at a time.

Gil Irizarry

Gil is the Chief Innovation Officer at Babel Street. He specializes in applying natural language processing and AI to identity resolution use cases. Gil’s work combines computational linguistics, machine learning and AI to produce state-of-the-art entity extraction and resolution applications. Gil’s focus on innovation led to his winning of Babel Street’s internal hackathon two years in a row.

Mae Wells-Kress

Mae Wells-Kress is the Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Babel Street. She has extensive experience across strategic and creative marketing roles, she implements process-driven lead generation efforts and develops strategic campaigns, events, and messaging that connect with audiences and helps organizations advance their missions in high stakes environments.

Craig Harmon

Craig is the Director of Partner Management at Babel Street. He leads the company’s strategic alliance with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A former Senior Partner Account Manager at AWS, Craig brings a hyperscaler‑native perspective to building and scaling partnerships that drive revenue growth and deepen technical collaboration. He is passionate about operational excellence and the design of high‑performance partner models that translate cloud innovation into measurable outcomes for customers and partners.