PEP Screening
The process of identifying individuals entrusted with a prominent public function — heads of state, ministers, senior judges, and the equivalent — plus their close family and associates, at onboarding and on an ongoing basis, so the relationship can receive enhanced due diligence.
PEP screening answers a different question from sanctions screening. Sanctions screening is a binary legal test — the party is designated or is not. PEP screening identifies a risk category that changes how a relationship is conducted, not whether it may exist at all: a PEP match is not a prohibition and is never itself a reason to refuse a customer. What it requires is senior management approval, reasonable measures to establish source of wealth and source of funds, and enhanced ongoing monitoring for as long as the relationship continues.
A useful PEP screening result resolves three things a bare "PEP: yes" leaves unanswered — how senior the office is (position tier), whether the office is foreign or domestic relative to the screening institution, and whether the match is the office-holder themselves or a relative/close associate whose risk is entirely derived from the relationship. There is also no single official global PEP list the way there is for a given country’s sanctions designations: PEP data is compiled from public office records, so coverage and freshness vary by dataset, and a PEP database is one input to a risk assessment rather than an authoritative register.