Sanctions lists and other watchlists name people, businesses, and countries that have posed (or are posing) serious threats to other countries – or even the international community. So these entities often have conditions or even prohibitions on dealing with them. If you fail to comply with a country or region’s restrictions while doing business there, you can face criminal penalties and other consequences.

Even if an entity doesn’t have restrictions on them, being on a watchlist is still a signal that they are high-risk to associate with. So you need to be extra careful in vetting them to ensure you don’t become a victim of – or accessory to – financial crime.

A PEP is someone who holds a public administrative position of some influence. This affords them extra resources and opportunities with which they could commit financial crimes. This also makes them a bigger target for criminals looking to exploit their powers.

PEPs may also sometimes include relatives and close associates (RCAs). RCAs may not hold politically exposed positions, but have close enough personal or professional relationships with someone who does that they can present similar risks.

Being designated a PEP or RCA doesn’t inherently mean a person is involved in criminal activity. However, they do present a higher risk of becoming involved in crime (including being targeted by, or forced to cooperate with, criminals). So they require a higher degree of due diligence when beginning or reviewing a relationship with a business they’re associated with.

The default data that comes with our Business Verification tool is direct from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), State Department, and Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) agencies. As for our Enhanced Screenings package: there are too many sources to list them all, but suffice to say they are all government departments and financial regulatory agencies from around the world.

Technically yes, but it’s incredibly difficult. Depending on how large your company is, you may have hundreds or even thousands of clients to verify – both businesses as well as their UBOs. In addition, depending on where you operate, you may have to check hundreds of watchlists to comply with regional regulations.

Multiply those two factors, and it’s going to take a lot of personnel and time to check each entity you need to one by one. That’s assuming, of course, you don’t have to repeat searches – which can be more necessary than you think. Names can be misspelled, have different spellings, be nicknames or aliases, or be abbreviations/contractions/acronyms/etc. This can lead you to sift through tons of false positives before you find an actual match, if you even find one at all.

So if you’re trying to save money by doing sanctions screening on your own, you’re really not going to come out any farther ahead. It’s better to use a software solution that can screen multiple entities at once, as well as account for name variations to more accurately find true positives while ignoring false ones.

You have to have an account with us, as well as both our Business Verification package and our Enhanced Screenings package. Then log into your dashboard and select the Business Verification – Verify tool. Enter a business’s name and address, along with (optionally) a list of people associated with the business, and run the search.

When the search is done, select the Global Watchlist report to see if any entities searched were on international sanctions lists or watchlists. Or, select the Politically Exposed Person report to see if any people you named were on a list of PEPs or RCAs. That’s all there is to the process; it shouldn’t take more than 15-30 minutes!