Sanctions Screening
The process of checking a name — a customer, counterparty, vessel, or supplier — against government lists of restricted parties before a transaction or relationship proceeds. When a name matches, the check holds until a person confirms whether the listed party and the party being screened are the same.
Sanctions screening exists because sanctions are prohibitions, not advisories: governments designate people, companies, vessels, and aircraft, then prohibit dealing with them, and screening is how a business finds out — before money moves — whether it is about to break that prohibition. It is distinct from KYC, which establishes who a customer is, and from the wider AML programme (transaction monitoring, SAR filing, governance) of which screening is one control. A mature programme screens more than customer names: beneficial owners and directors, counterparties and payment beneficiaries, suppliers and end users, and vessels or aircraft by structured identifiers like IMO number or tail number, each screened against a different combination of sanctions, export-control, and law-enforcement data.
The process runs in stages — input, normalisation, candidate retrieval, scoring, decision, and record — and the failure modes are stage-specific. Normalisation that strips too aggressively destroys the signal that would have matched; scoring that inflates on a single strong signal ignores how common a name is; and a match that clears or blocks automatically on score alone, without a person reviewing the corroborating evidence, is the single most common way screening programmes fail in practice.