Sanctions screening is a mandatory Anti-Money Laundering (AML) control process. It involves cross-referencing individuals, ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs), and corporate entities against international lists of sanctioned parties, terrorists, and embargoed countries.
The Legal Mandate for Screening
Governments and international bodies (such as the UN, the EU, and the US Treasury’s OFAC) maintain strict lists of entities with whom financial institutions are legally prohibited from doing business. If a payment processor facilitates a transaction for a sanctioned individual, they face catastrophic fines and criminal prosecution.
The Challenge of False Positives
Because watchlists often contain common names and lack granular identifiers, legacy screening systems generate massive amounts of false positives. Risk teams waste countless hours investigating alerts that turn out to be harmless, slowing down the entire onboarding pipeline.
High-Precision Screening with Onlayer
Onlayer plugs directly into leading data providers like Dow Jones, LexisNexis, and World-Check. Using advanced entity correlation and fuzzy logic, Onlayer screens merchants and beneficial owners in real time against OFAC, UN, HMT, EU, and Interpol watchlists—driving a >95% reduction in false positives and cutting manual review times by up to 60%.
