Sanctions Screening
Sanctions screening software, built on entity resolution — not name matching alone
A sanctions match is only as reliable as the entity resolution behind it. Here's how Veredis screens a counterparty, what evidence a match carries, and where a screening result can legitimately come back inconclusive.
The problem
Fuzzy name matching against a sanctions list produces two failure modes at once: it misses genuine matches hidden behind transliteration or abbreviation differences, and it floods reviewers with false positives from common names that happen to string-match a listed entity. Neither failure is acceptable in a regulated workflow — a missed match is a real compliance exposure, and a high false-positive rate trains reviewers to rubber-stamp alerts, which defeats the point of screening in the first place.
Veredis's approach: resolve the entity, then screen it
Before a name is checked against a sanctions list, Veredis attempts to resolve it to a real, identifiable entity — using official registry and ownership data (legal entity identifiers, corporate registry records, and beneficial-ownership signals where available) rather than treating the name string alone as the subject of the check. That resolution step is what lets a screening result distinguish "this is definitely the sanctioned party" from "this name superficially resembles a sanctioned party."
Sanctions-list data itself is versioned: every check records which list version and source was consulted and when, so a screening result from six months ago can be reconstructed exactly as it looked at the time — not re-evaluated silently against today's list and presented as if it were the original result.
The evidence model
- Which sanctions list(s) and versions were checked, and when
- The entity-resolution path used to identify the counterparty, not just the raw name string submitted
- Match confidence as a percentage, with the specific matched fields shown
- Whether a hit is direct (the named party itself) or indirect (an ownership or affiliation relationship)
Where the limitations are
Screening is a point-in-time check against the sources available at the time it runs. If an official source is temporarily unreachable, Veredis reports that check as source-unavailable rather than silently treating it as a clean result — a screening result that comes back "needs review" because a source could not be reached is not the same fact as a confirmed clean counterparty, and Veredis does not blur that distinction.
Veredis's sanctions screening is decision support, not a substitute for a qualified compliance officer's judgment on ambiguous matches, novel sanctions programmes, or jurisdiction-specific nuance a general-purpose rule set was not built to capture.
Governance
See Intelligence Sourcing & Data Boundary for exactly which registry and sanctions signals are served from governed, versioned intelligence versus queried live, and Security for how screening inputs are handled and retained.