Sanctions & Watchlist Screener: OFAC, UN, EU, UK in One Pass

Screen a list of people or companies against the five major official sanctions and export-control lists in a single run, with explainable match scores. Paste names, get one row per name: a clear hit or a clean no-hit, with every potential match spelled out (which list, which alias, what score, why it matched). The lists are downloaded fresh from the government sources on every run, so you are never screening against a stale copy.

Built for compliance officers, fintech and payment teams, exporters and freight forwarders, marketplaces onboarding sellers, and law firms running KYC/AML checks who need a defensible screening result without paying per-seat SaaS prices.

Which lists

Every run pulls the current published file straight from the issuing authority. No aggregator in between, no license strings attached:

List	Issuer	Typical size
OFAC SDN (Specially Designated Nationals)	US Treasury	~19,000 parties
Consolidated Screening List (Entity List, Denied Persons, ITAR and 10+ more)	US trade.gov	~26,000 parties
UN Security Council Consolidated List	United Nations	~1,000 parties
EU Financial Sanctions (FSF) Consolidated List	European Commission	~6,000 parties
UK OFSI Consolidated List	HM Treasury	~5,000 parties

Together that is roughly 57,000 listed parties and 143,000 searchable names and aliases per run.

Why this actor

• Explainable results, not a black box: every match carries the list, the exact alias that matched, a 70 to 100 score, the match type (exact, token-sort, name-in-name, initials, fuzzy) and a weak flag for the match shapes compliance analysts treat with suspicion.
• Clean no-hits are part of the product: a name with zero matches still gets its row, including the exact list versions screened against. That row is your audit trail.
• Real fuzzy matching: "Sberbnak of Rusia" still finds Sberbank at score 89. Transliteration variants, swapped letters, initials ("J. Smith"), names embedded in longer official names, all handled.
• False-positive control: low-quality aliases flagged by the issuing authorities only match exactly, single common names never flood your results, and the sensitivity threshold is yours to set.
• Official sources, refreshed every run: the list dates are in every output row, so you can prove what you screened against and when.
• Batch friendly: up to 10,000 names in one run, and you can pipe a dataset from another actor (company lists, supplier lists) straight in.

Use cases

• Customer and vendor onboarding: screen new accounts, suppliers or sellers before activation.
• Export compliance: check consignees and freight parties against the BIS Entity List and Denied Persons in the same pass as OFAC.
• Periodic re-screening: schedule a weekly run over your whole customer file and route the hits to your review queue.
• Deal and transaction checks: counterparties, UBOs and directors before signing.
• AI agents: plug it into Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, "is this supplier on any sanctions list?"

Input

{
    "names": ["Sberbank of Russia", "Wagner Group", "Marie Curie"],
    "threshold": 85
}

names takes people and companies mixed, up to 10,000 per run. threshold sets the minimum reported score: 100 means exact matches only, the default 85 also catches misspellings and containment matches, 70 casts the widest net. lists optionally narrows screening to specific lists (ofac_sdn, un, eu, uk_ofsi, us_csl); the default is all five.

Output

One row per screened name:

{
    "name": "Sberbank of Russia",
    "screened": true,
    "hit": true,
    "matchCount": 5,
    "topList": "US OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN)",
    "topEntityName": "PUBLIC JOINT STOCK COMPANY SBERBANK OF RUSSIA",
    "topScore": 100,
    "matches": [
        {
            "list": "ofac_sdn",
            "entityName": "PUBLIC JOINT STOCK COMPANY SBERBANK OF RUSSIA",
            "matchedName": "SBERBANK OF RUSSIA",
            "nameType": "aka",
            "score": 100,
            "matchType": "exact",
            "programs": "UKRAINE-EO13662] [RUSSIA-EO14024",
            "weak": false
        }
    ],
    "listsScreened": [
        { "list": "ofac_sdn", "listedParties": 19217, "listDate": "2026-07-15" }
    ],
    "threshold": 85,
    "screenedAt": "2026-07-17T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Pricing

You pay a flat fee per name screened, hit or no hit, plus a small run start fee. Screening 100 vendor names costs about $2. A comparable per-check SaaS subscription typically starts at $49 per month; here there is no seat, no subscription and no minimum.

FAQ

Is a hit proof that my counterparty is sanctioned? No. A hit is a potential match that a human should review; names collide, especially transliterated ones. The score, match type and weak flag are there to make that review fast. This actor is a screening aid, not legal advice.

Why do I get matches for a name that is not exactly on a list? Fuzzy and containment matching is the point of screening: sanctioned parties rarely appear under one canonical spelling. Raise threshold to 100 if you want exact matches only.

Where does the data come from? Directly from the issuing authorities (US Treasury, trade.gov, UN, European Commission, HM Treasury) at run time. Nothing is cached between runs and no third-party aggregator is involved.

What about non-Latin names? Matching runs on Latin script. Every official list ships Latin transliterations of its entries, and those are all indexed; a query in Arabic or Cyrillic script should be transliterated first.

Can I screen against just one list? Yes, set lists to the ones your program requires, for example ["ofac_sdn", "us_csl"] for a US-only export check.