Sanctions Screening is a critical component of KYC AML compliance, focusing on identifying and mitigating risks associated with individuals and entities subject to sanctions, embargoes, or watchlists. This process involves systematically checking against various global and local sanctions lists to prevent engaging with sanctioned parties. Effective sanctions screening helps institutions avoid financial and reputational damage by ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and reducing the risk of inadvertently facilitating illegal activities.
Key Challenges in Sanctions Screening
- Ability to precisely background screen to filter out individuals and entities from your existing or potential customers that are listed on any of the local, regional & global sanctions & watchlists. In other words, never missing out on a single True Positive match.
- Ability to screen all parties involved in financial transactions, including senders, beneficiaries, and banks, to ensure compliance with sanctions and prevent illicit activities through comprehensive Payment Screening and Transaction Screening.
- Ability to drastically reduce False Positives to save on unnecessary due diligence & KYC compliance costs.
- Ability to manage the entire Customer Identification Program (CIP) in a single application including updating of customer information as per changing risk categorization, expiration of documents, processing of raw sanctions/watchlists, etc.
- Ability to demonstrate robust Risk Based Customer Identification Program (CIP) under the overall KYC compliance process, during regulatory inspections.
Get a FREE guide to help you navigate through regulatory guidelines on sanctions, watchlists, and embargo lists screening processes to follow.
KYCsphere’s Sanctions Screening Solution
KYCsphere’s AI-powered Sanctions Screening tool empowers your users to pick up a needle from a haystack in an efficient manner. It helps you in screening not only customers but also employees, vendors, intermediaries, partners and others against your internally compiled lists and published lists. These privately circulated, public and commercially available lists are of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), persons involved in financial defaults, corruption, money laundering, fraud, crime, terrorism and host of other illegal acts. The background screening process follows the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommended risk-based approach, which truly constitutes the technology back-bone of the entire KYCsphere toolkit.
You have the freedom to select lists that are important to your institution with its operations in specific jurisdiction(s) from over 150 such lists from all of the global sanctioning bodies, law enforcement agencies and financial regulators worldwide. Thereon our watchlists maintenance team monitors & picks up these raw lists as soon as they are published, validates for data consistency, translates, localizes & loads into the KYCsphere database. This list customization process ensures reduction in the number of false positives, while minimizing risks of true positives escaping. These watchlists are constantly watched over by us for incremental updates, additions & deletions towards ensuring that your institution does not miss a single heartbeat to keep undesirable elements associated with money laundering, fraud, crime & terrorism, out of your business process. This feature-rich tool thus gives your institution market agility and regulatory flexibility without any capital expenditure and with the least of IT intervention.
See KYCsphere’s Sanctions, Watchlists, and Embargo Lists Screening Tool in action.
Key Benefits of KYCsphere’s Sanctions Screening Tool
- Protects your institution against defaulters, corrupt, money launderers, fraudsters, criminals and terrorists becoming your customers or sending/receiving payments & remittances.
- Sanctions, watchlists and embargo lists around the world usually get published in such diverse & raw forms at irregular intervals that managing them is one of the most difficult tasks of the KYC screening process. Outsourcing this activity gives your compliance team the much-needed time to focus on filtering out high risk individuals & entities including HNIs, Non-Residents, PEPs and blocking out ultra-high-risk persons & organizations.
- Robust features of the tool facilitate entity resolution by way of advanced name and address matching algorithm that has tolerance for misspellings, alternate spellings, abbreviations etc. The matched results are risk prioritized with extent & probability of match, while giving you the control of setting the thresh-holds. By this manner much of false positives are automatically handled by the tool, without any manual intervention.
- Efficient batch scans against updated lists and constant surveillance-based ad-hoc & periodic KYC reviews of existing customers and their payment transactions.
- You can manage the entire KYC compliance process in simple Internet browser, including new customer account opening process, ID & Address verification, further integrated with risk and compliance management, due diligence and regulatory reporting tools. This would accelerate the process of profitable customers’ onboarding and would mitigate the risks of losses due to criminals exploiting your institution.
- In addition to zero capital expenditure for using cloud based KYCsphere screening infrastructure, and since you can choose from the global, regional and your country’s local sanctions/watchlists, you only incur subscription fees for lists that you subscribe to.
- This tool provides organizations with a fully auditable process, look backs and reporting to be able to withstand Customer Identification Program (CIP) regulatory scrutiny.
Ask our Sanctions, Watchlists & Embargo Lists Screening Expert to get in touch with you.
FAQs
What is Sanctions Screening Software, and why is it important?
Sanctions screening software helps institutions automatically check individuals and entities against global, regional, and local sanctions lists to avoid engaging with restricted parties. This is crucial for maintaining compliance, reducing financial and reputational risk, and ensuring no illegal activity occurs under your watch.
How does KYCsphere’s Sanctions Screening Tool reduce false positives?
KYCsphere’s advanced AI and name-matching algorithms minimize false positives by accurately identifying entities despite misspellings, abbreviations, and alternate spellings. This saves time and costs by reducing unnecessary due diligence, allowing your team to focus on genuine risks.
How often are sanctions and watchlists updated in KYCsphere?
KYCsphere’s team continuously monitors and updates all global and local lists as soon as they’re published. This real-time update process ensures that your institution is always compliant with the latest regulations, mitigating the risk of working with high-risk individuals or entities.
Which lists are covered in KYCsphere’s Sanctions Screening Tool?
KYCsphere offers access to over 150 global, regional, and local sanctions lists from regulatory bodies, law enforcement, and financial institutions. You can customize the lists based on your operational jurisdiction, ensuring you’re screening only what’s relevant to your institution.
Can KYCsphere’s tool handle batch scanning for sanctions lists?
Yes, KYCsphere’s Sanctions Screening Tool supports efficient batch scans, enabling comprehensive screening of multiple entities at once. This ensures that both new and existing customers are screened regularly, maintaining ongoing compliance and risk mitigation.