Overview#
A bank that processes a payment to a sanctioned entity, even inadvertently, faces penalties that can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Compliance teams at financial institutions, trade finance desks, and KYC operations handle thousands of counterparty verifications daily, which makes manual sanctions checking impossible at scale. Sanctions Screening automates that process against 37+ global lists, handles the transliteration and alias variations that catch out simpler tools, and keeps pace with list updates so that a designation issued this morning is checked against by this afternoon.
Sanctions list synchronisation occurs on a frequent cycle to ensure screening reflects the most current regulatory requirements across all major sanctioning authorities.
Key Features#
- Real-Time Entity Screening: Instant verification against 37+ global sanctions lists including OFAC SDN, EU Consolidated, UN Security Council, and HM Treasury with fuzzy name matching for typos and transliterations
- Multi-List Coverage: Comprehensive screening across US, EU, UK, UN, and country-specific sanctions programs including SDN, sectoral sanctions, embargo lists, and non-proliferation designations
- Fuzzy Matching: ML-powered name matching handling transliterations, alternate spellings, aliases, and naming convention variations across languages and scripts
- PEP Screening: Politically Exposed Person identification across heads of state, government officials, military leaders, and their family members and close associates
- Adverse Media Monitoring: Automated screening against negative news sources for fraud, corruption, money laundering, terrorism, and other risk indicators
- Batch Screening: Process large entity lists for portfolio screening, customer base reviews, and periodic compliance checks with automated result classification
- Continuous Monitoring: Ongoing screening against sanctions list updates with automatic re-screening of existing entities and alert generation for new matches
- Case Management: Investigation workflow for match review, false positive disposition, escalation routing, and compliance documentation with audit trails
Use Cases#
- Customer Onboarding: Screen new customers against sanctions lists and PEP databases during KYC processes with real-time results and risk-based decision support
- Transaction Monitoring: Verify counterparties in financial transactions against sanctions lists to prevent prohibited dealings and maintain regulatory compliance
- Portfolio Screening: Periodically re-screen existing customer bases against updated sanctions lists to detect newly designated entities requiring action
- Trade Compliance: Screen parties to international trade transactions including shippers, consignees, and end-users against export control and sanctions lists
- Regulatory Reporting: Generate compliance documentation, match disposition records, and audit trails required by financial regulators and sanctions authorities
Integration#
The platform integrates with the broader Argus OSINT ecosystem for cross-domain intelligence, KYC and AML compliance workflows, transaction monitoring systems, and regulatory reporting platforms. Sanctions screening connects to organisation intelligence and person intelligence modules for beneficial ownership verification alongside entity screening. Supports both real-time API screening and batch processing for enterprise compliance operations. Screening results export via STIX/TAXII for sharing with compliance partners and connect to the 153 third-party provider integrations available through the Argus provider orchestration layer.
Open Standards#
- FollowTheMoney (FtM) Data Model: Bulk entity data is ingested from OpenSanctions in newline-delimited JSON files that conform to the FollowTheMoney schema, mapping entity types, aliases, and identifier properties directly to the internal screening database.
- STIX 2.1 / OASIS TAXII 2.1: Sanctions screening results are exported as STIX 2.1 Structured Threat Information Expression bundles and distributed via TAXII 2.1 collections, enabling interoperable sharing of match intelligence with compliance partners and threat-intelligence platforms.
- ISO 3166-1: Nationality and country-of-incorporation fields on screened entities are stored and matched using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 country codes, as sourced from the FollowTheMoney entity properties.
- ISO 17442 (Legal Entity Identifier): LEI identifiers are extracted from FollowTheMoney entity properties during bulk synchronisation and indexed alongside registration numbers and SWIFT/BIC codes to support entity disambiguation across financial counterparties.
- FATF Recommendations (Financial Action Task Force): The PEP screening logic and audit-trail retention model are designed to satisfy FATF Recommendation 12 (Politically Exposed Persons) and Recommendation 10 (Customer Due Diligence), as stated in the compliance documentation for the sanctions entity persistence layer.
- EU Anti-Money Laundering Directives (4AMLD / 5AMLD / 6AMLD): The audit-trail and match-disposition records are structured to meet the documentation requirements of the EU AML Directive series, covering beneficial ownership verification, ongoing monitoring obligations, and enhanced due diligence records.
- GraphQL (June 2018 specification): All screening queries, batch operations, match confirmations, and case-management mutations are exposed through a typed GraphQL API, with camelCase field conventions enforced across the schema.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-23 Last Updated: 2026-04-14