Designated parties do not put their own names on transactions. Sanctions evasion happens through front companies, transhipment, payment routing, and ownership obfuscation — patterns that name-matching screening cannot catch on its own. This guide covers 12 red flags that mature sanctions programmes monitor, drawn from FinCEN, OFAC, OFSI and FATF guidance.
Single-snapshot screening at onboarding leaves the firm exposed to every list update made after the customer joined. This guide covers how often to rescreen customers, frequency calibration by risk tier, material-change triggers that should accelerate screening, and what FATF, MAS, FCA and FinCEN actually expect in inspection.
Every regulated firm must screen against sanctions lists — but the six major lists differ materially in scope, update cadence and extraterritorial reach. This guide compares OFAC, UN, EU, UK HMT, MAS and AUSTRAC, and explains how to build a defensible multi-list screening programme that satisfies every applicable regime.
Adverse media screening searches the open and licensed information environment for risk signals about a customer — investigations, prosecutions, regulatory findings, sanctions adjacency, and reputational events. It sits alongside sanctions and PEP screening as a core component of customer due diligence. This guide explains what it covers, where the false-positive problem comes from, and how to design a programme that scales.
Sanctions screening is the real-time process of checking every customer and transaction against global watchlists — OFAC, UN, EU, HMT. This guide explains how list matching works, why fuzzy logic is non-negotiable, and how to build a screening programme that catches real hits without drowning in false positives.
