Free Sanctions & PEP Screening Check
See how sanctions and PEP screening works. Enter a name to view exactly what a live screening checks — across sanctions lists, PEP databases and adverse media.
Educational demonstration only. This tool does not query live watchlists and does not provide a pass/fail result or a compliance decision. For real screening, book a demo.
A live screening of this name would check:
What Sanctions & PEP Screening Actually Does
Sanctions screening checks a customer or transaction against government and international watchlists to prevent dealings with designated parties. Because it is strict-liability, a single missed match can mean serious penalties — so screening must run at onboarding, on transactions, and continuously as lists change.
PEP screening identifies politically exposed persons — and their relatives and close associates — who carry higher corruption risk and require Enhanced Due Diligence. Alongside these, adverse-media screening surfaces negative news that may not yet appear on any official list.
The operational challenge is precision: literal name matching flags every similar name, so effective screening uses tuneable fuzzy matching and clear disposition workflows to separate genuine hits from noise.
What This Demo Shows, and What It Does Not
This tool is a demonstration of matching behaviour. It is useful for seeing how a name resolves against sanctions and PEP data and why a particular record surfaces — and it is deliberately not a compliance control. The difference matters, so it is worth being explicit about where the line falls.
What it shows. How fuzzy matching handles transliteration, name order and spelling variation; why a near match is returned rather than discarded; and what the evidence behind a hit looks like when it is presented properly rather than as a raw score.
What it does not do. It does not record a screening decision, retain an audit trail, re-screen the name when lists change, resolve ownership to catch entities caught by control rules, or produce anything a supervisor would accept as evidence that screening was performed. A single point-in-time lookup is not a screening programme, and nothing here should be filed as though it were.
That last point is the one firms most often get wrong in reverse: treating a clean result as a conclusion. A name that is clear today can be listed tomorrow, which is why ongoing re-screening, not the initial check, is where most sanctions exposure is actually managed.
From Demo to Real, Auditable Screening
This tool shows the idea. The One Constellation platform does it for real — at scale, in real time, with a full audit trail.
What a Real Screening Programme Adds
Moving from a lookup to a control means adding the parts this demo leaves out. In rough order of how often they are missed:
- Re-screening on list change. The initial check is the easy part. Exposure accumulates between checks, so the whole book has to be re-screened whenever lists move — not on a calendar.
- Ownership and control. Sanctions reach entities owned or controlled by designated persons even when the entity itself is not listed. That requires resolving the ownership chain, which name matching alone cannot do. See UBO unwrapping.
- Tuning, with evidence. Thresholds set once and never revisited are the most common source of both noise and missed matches. Changes need to be tested and recorded, not adjusted quietly — our tuning methodology sets out how.
- A decision record. For every alert: who reviewed it, what they saw, what they concluded and when. Under inspection this is the control, more than the matching engine that produced the alert.
- List provenance. Which lists, from which source, refreshed how often, and what happens when a feed fails silently.
Our sanctions screening page covers how these run together, and what a screening programme involves covers the operating model around them.
Sanctions & PEP Screening FAQ
Screen Customers for Real
Book a demo to run live sanctions, PEP and adverse-media screening with full audit trails on the One Constellation platform.
