Sanctions Screening

Sanctions screening is the practice of checking a person's or organization's name, and usually other identifying details like date of birth, nationality, and address, since names alone produce false matches constantly, against government and international sanctions and watchlists, to confirm a business isn't onboarding or transacting with someone it's legally forbidden to deal with. It typically also covers PEP screening: checking whether someone is a Politically Exposed Person (a current or former senior government official, or a close associate/family member of one), which doesn't mean they're barred from doing business but does mean regulation usually requires extra scrutiny given the elevated corruption and bribery risk.

Two details matter for understanding why this is harder than it sounds. First, matching is fuzzy by necessity, sanctioned individuals show up in source data with transliterated name spellings, aliases, and incomplete birthdates, so a real screening system has to tolerate approximate matches without drowning compliance teams in false positives. Second, screening isn't a one-time check: sanctions lists change constantly, so a properly run program re-screens its entire existing customer base whenever a list updates, not just new customers at signup, someone who was clean yesterday can be sanctioned today.

Who actually built this

The lists themselves come from government and international bodies, the US Treasury's OFAC list, the UN Security Council's Consolidated List, the EU Council's sanctions list, and the UK's OFSI list are the ones most screening programs check against, alongside national PEP databases. The commercial screening industry that turns those raw lists into searchable, fuzzy-matchable products, Refinitiv World-Check, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance, ComplyAdvantage, and similar vendors, has existed for decades. None of it is Solidus's design or Solidus's product.

Solidus today

Solidus has not built sanctions or PEP screening into any product. Solidus Verify confirms identity (document authenticity plus a live face match); it does not check the verified person against any watchlist. This is the same deliberate gap documented under AML: regulated-tier trust that would require sanctions-grade screening is a later, unstarted phase, not something quietly assumed to already work.

See also

AML is the compliance program sanctions screening sits inside. KYB needs an entity-level version of this same check. KYC is the identity-verification leg that sanctions screening is layered on top of, never a substitute for.