01
List coverage
Screen against OFAC, EU, UN, UK and other relevant sanctions and watchlists appropriate to your markets.
Glossary · Sanctions Screening
What is Sanctions Screening?
Making sure you never do business with a prohibited party.
Sanctions screening is the process of checking customers, businesses, and counterparties against government and international sanctions lists to ensure a firm does not transact with prohibited individuals, entities, or jurisdictions.
02
Fuzzy matching
Account for spelling variants, transliteration, and aliases so near-matches are not missed.
03
Match review
Investigate and disposition potential matches — clearing false positives and escalating true hits.
04
Continuous rescreening
Re-screen the customer base as lists change, not only at onboarding.
Definition
Sanctions screening compares names and identifiers against watchlists maintained by bodies such as OFAC (US), the EU, the UN, and HM Treasury (UK). It runs at onboarding and continuously, generating potential matches that must be reviewed and either dismissed as false positives or escalated and reported.
Why sanctions screening matters
Sanctions breaches are strict-liability in many regimes: a firm can be penalized even without intent. Screening is non-negotiable for regulated businesses and is one of the highest-priority AML controls, with severe fines and criminal exposure for failures.
How Pegalio helps
Screening engines generate alerts; Pegalio manages what happens next. A potential match can block onboarding progression, open a review task routed to the right analyst via RBAC, and require documented disposition before the case proceeds. Every match, decision, and reviewer is captured in the audit log, giving you defensible evidence that screening was performed and resolved.
Frequently asked questions
Which lists should I screen against?
At minimum the lists relevant to your jurisdictions and customers — commonly OFAC, EU, UN, and HM Treasury — plus any sector-specific lists.
What is a false positive?
A potential match flagged by the screening engine that, on review, is not the sanctioned party — often due to a shared or similar name.
How often should screening run?
At onboarding and continuously thereafter, because sanctions lists are updated frequently.
What do I do with a true match?
Stop the transaction or onboarding, escalate per your policy, and report to the relevant authority as required by law.