Sanctions Screening — EU, UN, OFAC & UK Watchlists

Screen names of people, companies and vessels against the four consolidated sanctions lists that matter — the European Union, the UN Security Council, the US Treasury's OFAC and the UK's FCDO — in a single pass, with a match score and the legal reference behind every hit.

Roughly 33,000 designations, downloaded fresh on every run from the authorities themselves.

What a screening looks like

Ask about Rosneft:

List	Matched entry	Programme	Score
UK	ROSNEFT	The Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations	100
EU	ROSNEFT AERO	UKR	100
OFAC	OPEN JOINT-STOCK COMPANY ROSNEFT OIL COMPANY	UKRAINE-EO13662, RUSSIA-EO14024	100

Wagner Group comes back designated under two separate regimes — Libya and Russia — which is exactly the kind of detail a single-list check misses. Jean Dupont and Acme Trading Ltd come back clean.

How matching works

Names never arrive in the form a list holds them. So before comparing, both sides are stripped of accents, punctuation, honorifics and corporate suffixes — Ltd, GmbH, OOO, JSC and the rest — and the score blends token overlap with character similarity. Rosneft Oil Company, ROSNEFT and Rosneft' Neftyanaya Kompaniya all reach the same designation.

Every alias a list publishes is matched too, and matchedOnAlias tells you when the hit came through one.

Choosing the threshold is the real decision. 100 demands a character-for-character match and will miss every transliteration — useless against Russian, Arabic or Chinese names. 85 is the usual compliance setting: it catches spelling and word-order variants while keeping the review load sane. Below 70 you will be reading a lot of noise.

What you get per hit

The authority, the matched name, the score, whether it came via an alias, the sanctions programme, the legal instrument, the designation date, the entity type, the country and any published remark. Enough for an analyst to clear or escalate without opening four websites.

What this is and is not

It is a screening tool: it tells you which names resemble a designated party, on lists refreshed at the moment you run it.

It is not a compliance decision. A hit is a candidate to review, not a finding — common names generate false positives, and no name-matching system substitutes for a human assessing identity, dates of birth, addresses and beneficial ownership. Equally, an absence of hits is not a clean bill of health: these four lists are not every list in the world, and sanctions can attach through ownership and control rather than by name. Your obligations under EU Regulation 2580/2001, OFAC's 50 Percent Rule, the UK's ownership provisions and your own programme remain entirely yours.

Keep the output. Regulators ask what you screened, against which lists, on which date, at which threshold — and the summary row records all four.

Sources

List	Publisher
EU	European Commission — Financial Sanctions Database
UN	UN Security Council — consolidated list
OFAC	US Treasury — Specially Designated Nationals
UK	FCDO — UK Sanctions List

Each is published by its authority for exactly this purpose and is free to use. No credentials, no third-party aggregator, no per-name licence fee.

Frequently asked

Why does a list sometimes load zero entries? Because the authority changed its export. The summary row reports what loaded and what failed, so a partial run is never silent — and the failure is usually fixed within a day.

Does it cover PEPs? No. Politically exposed persons are a separate category with no single official list; these four are sanctions designations only.

How current is it? As current as the publishers. The lists are downloaded on every run, never cached between runs.

Can I screen thousands of names? Yes. The lists are fetched once per run and held in memory, so ten thousand names costs barely more than ten.