What is sanctions screening?
Sanctions screening compares a person, company, vessel or financial institution against government sanctions lists, at onboarding and repeatedly afterwards, so that a regulated firm does not deal with a designated target or with its blocked property.
Sanctions are prohibitions, not risk scores. A designation by OFAC, the EU, the UN or the UK freezes assets and bars dealings from its effective date, and liability is strict in most regimes, so an honest mistake is still a breach. The misunderstanding that costs money is treating screening as an onboarding step: lists change several times a week, and a name that produced nothing in January can be designated by March.
What this workflow covers
SCOPE- Match the name, aliases, country and identifiers against every list you are legally in scope for.
- Put a person on each candidate above threshold and record the identifiers compared and the reason for the outcome.
- Ownership can block a company whose name appears on no list; OFAC's 50 percent rule is the usual route.
- Quick Check runs sanctions, PEP and criminal-watchlist screening in one pass and stores the result as a point-in-time snapshot instead of recalculating it when lists move.
- A no-match result means no match in the sources checked on that date. It is not a verdict on the counterparty.
Compliance glossary
TERMS- Name screening
- Matching a customer or counterparty name against list records, as opposed to screening the parties named in a payment message.
- Candidate match
- A list record the matching engine returned for review; it becomes a true match only after an analyst confirms the identifiers.
- Disposition
- The recorded outcome of a candidate review: true match, false positive, or escalate for further work.
Authoritative references
SOURCES- 01Sanctions Programs and Country Information
U.S. Department of the Treasury — OFAC
- 02Overview of sanctions and related tools
European Commission
- 03The FATF Recommendations
Financial Action Task Force
Frequently asked questions
Q&A- Which lists are we actually required to screen?
- It follows your establishment, your currencies and your counterparties. An EU firm applies EU restrictive measures and the UN measures transposed into EU law; touching USD or US persons pulls in OFAC; a UK nexus pulls in the UK Sanctions List. Most firms screen the major regimes together and write down why, which is cheaper than defending a narrow scope later.
- We screen at onboarding. Is that enough?
- No, and the gap widens every week. Major authorities amend their lists several times a week, so a book screened once is measured against a list that has since moved. Continuous or daily re-screening of the whole book, plus an immediate re-run after a significant designation round, is what keeps the exposure short.
- Our system flagged a customer. Have we breached anything?
- A hit is a candidate for review, not a breach. Most candidates fail on identifiers: common names, transliteration variants, missing dates of birth. A breach arises only if you actually deal with a designated party or with blocked property.
- Can we let the system close matches without a reviewer?
- The matching can be automated; the disposition cannot be left unrecorded. Regulators expect a documented human decision on each candidate above threshold, showing which identifiers were compared and why the outcome went the way it did.