Overview#
Sanctions lists change without warning. A financial institution that screened a customer against OFAC data from three days ago may have missed a designation published that morning. For banks, payment processors, and law enforcement agencies, the cost of screening against stale data can be severe: regulatory fines, reputational damage, or worse, facilitating a prohibited transaction.
The Compliance OpenSanctions Sync module addresses this by maintaining near real-time access to millions of sanctioned entities from over 140 global sanctions lists via the OpenSanctions integration. Frequent synchronisation intervals ensure investigators and compliance teams always screen against current data. Advanced fuzzy matching and ML-powered entity resolution handle the name variations, transliterations, and aliases that simple exact-match screening misses entirely.
Key Features#
- Comprehensive coverage across OFAC, EU, UN, UK HMT, DFAT, and 140+ global sanctions lists via OpenSanctions integration
- Frequent synchronisation ensuring near real-time sanctions list updates that eliminate screening gaps between official publications
- Advanced fuzzy matching detecting name variations, transliterations, and aliases with high precision
- ML-powered entity resolution reducing false positives and eliminating unnecessary manual review overhead
- Continuous monitoring triggering instant alerts when new sanctions match existing investigation subjects or monitored entities
- Relationship analysis identifying connections between sanctioned entities and associated shell companies or intermediaries
- Batch screening capabilities for portfolio-wide re-screening upon sanctions list updates
- Configurable screening sensitivity with multi-level match confidence scoring to balance coverage against false positive rates
Use Cases#
- Financial Institution Screening: Banks and payment processors screen customers and transactions against global sanctions lists, maintaining regulatory compliance from onboarding through ongoing relationship management
- Cryptocurrency Exchange Compliance: Exchanges screen wallet addresses and entity information against sanctions databases to prevent prohibited transactions before they are processed
- Investigation Support: Law enforcement and intelligence agencies identify sanctions connections within investigation subjects and their networks, enriching case intelligence automatically
- Ongoing Monitoring: Compliance teams at financial institutions receive instant alerts when existing customers or investigation subjects appear on newly updated sanctions lists, enabling timely action
Integration#
- Connects with KYC/KYB platforms for automated onboarding screening
- Compatible with transaction monitoring systems for real-time screening workflows
- Supports case management platforms for automated investigation initiation upon confirmed matches
- Webhook notifications for real-time alerting on sanctions matches
- Role-based access controls with comprehensive audit logging
- Multi-tenant data isolation for shared-services deployments
Open Standards#
- FollowTheMoney (FtM) data model: The sync engine ingests OpenSanctions bulk exports in newline-delimited FtM JSON format, mapping FtM schema types (Person, Company, Ownership, Family) directly to the internal entity model for consistent cross-list entity resolution.
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2/alpha-3: Nationality and country attributes on sanctioned entities are stored and queried using ISO 3166 country codes, enabling jurisdiction-aware filtering and consistent cross-list comparisons.
- ISO 8601: All timestamps for entity first-seen, last-changed, and screening-history records are parsed and serialised in ISO 8601 format, supporting incremental sync logic and audit trail ordering.
- FATF Recommendations (AML/CFT): The mandatory screening audit trail and continuous-monitoring obligations implemented here directly support compliance with FATF Recommendations 6, 7, and 10 on targeted financial sanctions and ongoing customer due diligence.
- EU Anti-Money Laundering Directives (5AMLD/6AMLD): The screening history table and batch re-screening on list updates are explicitly designed to satisfy EU AML Directive obligations for documented sanctions checks at onboarding and throughout the customer relationship.
- LEI (Legal Entity Identifier, ISO 17442) / ISIN (ISO 6166) / SWIFT BIC (ISO 9362): The identifier extraction layer reads
lei,isin, andswiftBicfields from FtM entity properties, enabling matching against standardised financial-institution and security identifiers present in multiple sanctions lists. - GraphQL: All sanctions-screening queries, batch operations, and continuous-monitoring subscriptions are exposed through a typed GraphQL API, providing a consistent, schema-validated interface for integration with KYC platforms and case management systems.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14