Sanctions Screening for Business: A Buyer's Guide

If you search "sanctions screening," you'll find three very different kinds of products, and picking the wrong one wastes either money or time. Here's how to tell them apart.

The three tiers

Free, self-serve government lookups. OFAC's own sanctions search is free and checks the US list directly. The UN and EU each publish their own consolidated lists too. These are genuinely useful for a quick, single-list check, but they only cover one list at a time, require you to interpret ambiguous name matches yourself, and don't touch offshore ownership, adverse media, or entity registration.

Enterprise compliance platforms. Providers like ComplyAdvantage, Refinitiv World-Check, and similar tools sell ongoing, high-volume screening to banks and regulated firms, typically as a subscription with a minimum contract. This is the right tool if you're screening thousands of customers a month as part of a formal AML program. It's the wrong tool if you need to check one investor before signing one deal, you'll be paying for infrastructure you don't need.

One-off verification reports. This is the gap between those two: checking a specific counterparty against multiple lists at once, with human review of ambiguous matches, delivered as a single purchase with no ongoing commitment.

What proper sanctions screening actually checks

A screening that only checks one list misses real exposure. A subject absent from the US list can appear on the UN's or the EU's. Proper screening runs all three:

• OFAC (US Treasury) — the SDN list and sectoral sanctions
• UN Security Council Consolidated List — sanctions tied to Security Council resolutions
• EU Consolidated List — the EU's own sanctions regime, which doesn't always mirror the US list

It should also flag politically exposed persons (see our explainer on PEP screening) and cross-reference offshore ownership data, since a sanctioned party can sit behind a clean-looking holding structure.

The part that actually matters: handling name matches correctly

Common names produce false positives on every list. A screening tool that treats any name match as a confirmed hit will flag people who did nothing wrong; one that requires an exact match will miss real hits with slightly different name formatting. Proper screening tiers confidence: an exact match on name plus an independent identifier (date of birth, nationality) is confirmed; a name-only match is flagged for human review, not treated as fact.

Choosing between the three tiers

If you're screening one counterparty for one decision, a one-off report checking all three major lists plus PEP and offshore exposure is the right fit, cheaper and faster than a platform, more complete than a single free lookup. If you're screening customers continuously at volume, a platform earns its subscription. If you just need to sanity-check one name once, the free government lists are a reasonable start, just don't mistake one clean list for a clean subject.

Scrutinex builds the middle tier: every report screens OFAC, UN, and EU together, with PEP and offshore exposure included, for a fixed price. See a sample report or order a screening on a specific subject.