Sanctions and AML Insights

Compliance teams routinely discover during an audit that they can prove a screen happened but not what it was screened against, at what threshold, or why an alert was cleared. Using NYDFS's 2017 findings against Habib Bank as a real example of what happens when disposition rationale goes undocumented, this post specifies the evidence set a defensible screening trail requires, the format considerations that make it usable years later, and retention periods across the US, UK, and EU.

Most firms either rescreen everyone on a fixed annual cycle, which is expensive and slow to catch new designations, or rescreen only on trigger events, which leaves the gaps regulators have flagged for years. This post lays out a risk tier matrix with recommended cadence per tier, the event triggers that should override any schedule, and the tradeoff between full-base rescreening and delta screening against list changes only.

A practical guide for procurement teams on vendor and supplier sanctions screening, covering why procurement and compliance share counterparty risk, what to screen vendors against, how to screen at onboarding and on an ongoing basis, and how to embed screening into procurement workflows via API.

Address and destination geography are the primary sanctions control at most freight forwarders and logistics operators, and that is the gap regulators keep exploiting. Using OFAC's 2025 enforcement action against Fracht FWO as a real worked example, this post lays out what to screen instead, in priority order, and why noticing a red flag is not the same as acting on it.

A decision guide for compliance and engineering teams on when to use a real-time sanctions screening API versus batch screening, covering the blind window risk, the Block Inc. backlog that produced a $40M NYDFS fine, false positive management, and a practical decision matrix by use case.

A buyer's guide to sanctions screening software built from the failure modes that produced 2025's largest AML penalties — Block's misconfigured Bitcoin thresholds, GVA Capital's $216M ownership-resolution failure, and a 169,000-alert backlog — so compliance teams can evaluate vendors against what regulators actually penalize.