Sanctions screening: how quickly can you respond to change?

The recent Communication from the Bank of Italy draws PSPs’ and CASPs’ attention to the effectiveness of controls relating to restrictive measures. For organisations managing sanctions screening, the practical question is: can your data, systems and processes respond quickly enough when the risk landscape changes?

A new designation, a change to an existing restrictive measure or an update to a subject’s information may require timely checks across customers and transactions.
The Bank of Italy’s Communication therefore highlights a very practical point: having access to the right lists is not enough. Data, system configuration and control procedures need to work together effectively.
For PSPs and CASPs, this translates into several concrete operational needs.

Keep sanctions screening up to date

Effective controls start with the ability to identify new designations and changes quickly.

The longer the delay between an update to a restrictive measure and its availability within screening systems, the greater the risk of performing checks against information that is no longer current.

Through its Sanctions dataset, WatchBase™ provides information from international and national sanctions regimes.

Where timeliness is particularly critical, Sanctions Live Screening provides high-frequency updates for major sanctions regimes, including the European Union, United Nations, OFAC, the United Kingdom and SECO.

The aim is to reduce the time between a change in restrictive measures and its availability within screening processes.

Screen the right people at the right time

Screening does not end at onboarding.

Among other points, the Bank of Italy highlights the need to re-screen customers when relevant events occur, such as the introduction of new restrictive measures.

This is particularly relevant in the context of instant payments (learn more in the insight), where the focus shifts from checking each individual transaction to the ability to keep customer screening continuously up to date.

This creates a practical challenge: how can organisations carry out frequent re-screening, including across large customer populations, without significantly increasing manual workload?

Through DailyControl™ Monitor, APIs and Data On-Premise, Dataware enables organisations to adapt screening and monitoring to their operating model, from individual name checks to integrated, high-volume processes.

Reduce noise without missing relevant signals

Increasing matching sensitivity indiscriminately can generate more alerts and more manual review. Making it too restrictive, on the other hand, may increase the risk of missing a relevant match.

The challenge is to strike the right balance between detection capability and reducing false positives.

This is where the quality of the underlying information becomes critical.

A name alone is rarely enough. Aliases, dates of birth, nationalities, locations, identifiers and relationships between entities can all help analysts understand a potential match more clearly.

This is the principle behind how Dataware builds and maintains its database: relevant information is organised, structured and connected to make the analysis of subjects and potential matches more effective.

Combining structured data, Entity Resolution and matching tools helps narrow the scope of analysis more quickly and allows teams to focus their attention on genuinely relevant results.