Sanctions and AML Insights

The OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) sanctions lists are essential tools used by the U.S. government to enforce foreign policy and national security objectives by targeting individuals, organisations, and countries involved in activities like terrorism, corruption, or arms proliferation. These lists—such as the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List and various non-SDN lists—restrict access to the U.S. financial system and prohibit transactions with listed entities. While centred in the United States, the global impact of OFAC sanctions means businesses worldwide must remain compliant to avoid severe penalties or reputational damage. With tools like the Sanctions List Search and downloadable datasets, OFAC facilitates screening and compliance efforts, making it crucial for companies to implement regular monitoring, staff training, and legal oversight to mitigate risks.

A minister leaves office. How long do you keep treating them as a PEP? Their spouse, their business partner, their adult child? FATF, the EU, the UK, and the US all answer this differently, and most firms have never actually compared the four side by side. This post lays out the real positions, the scope question around relatives and close associates, and the governance point that ties it together.

Most firms set one fuzzy-matching threshold at implementation and apply it to every list they screen, including sanctions and PEP data, without ever revisiting the decision. This post argues that's a configuration accident, not a risk decision, and walks through why sanctions and PEP screening deserve different settings, with worked examples across payments, B2B onboarding, and insurance.

Almost everything written about sanctions screening covers finding the match. Almost nothing covers the twenty minutes after, which is when firms actually get into trouble. This post walks through what a confirmed hit obliges you to do: blocking versus rejecting, the reporting clocks, what you can and cannot tell the customer, and what happens to the relationship afterward.

A compliance guide for global payment platforms on screening contractor and payroll payouts against sanctions lists, covering why every payout requires screening, the speed-versus-compliance tension in instant payment rails, and how to implement real-time API screening that keeps false positives low.

Compliance teams routinely discover during an audit that they can prove a screen happened but not what it was screened against, at what threshold, or why an alert was cleared. Using NYDFS's 2017 findings against Habib Bank as a real example of what happens when disposition rationale goes undocumented, this post specifies the evidence set a defensible screening trail requires, the format considerations that make it usable years later, and retention periods across the US, UK, and EU.