Watchlist screening is the process of checking customers, counterparties and other entities against sanctions lists, PEP databases and other watchlists to identify individuals or organisations subject to restrictions or enhanced due diligence. It is a regulatory requirement across all major financial jurisdictions.
Regulators expect you to screen customers, counterparties, vessels, aircraft and locations against sanctions lists, PEP databases and other watchlists. The challenge is doing it accurately across hundreds of millions of names, hundreds of languages, multiple jurisdictions and constantly evolving risk data.
With Ripjar's Watchlist Screening, you get proprietary name matching, configurable list selection and a dual-index architecture that makes enterprise-scale screening computationally efficient. Fewer false positives. More true positives found. Updates processed in hours, not days.
Screen against Politically Exposed Persons and their relatives and close associates. Configure which role categories to screen against and when to stop screening a PEP after they leave their politically exposed role.
Return results based on address matching alone, regardless of name or entity type. Required by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and increasingly important for trade compliance.
Confirm whether any entity has links to a listed location by name, nationality, incorporation, or address. Catches the risks that name-only screening misses.
Control when data should re-alert based on the nature of the change since last review. Define what constitutes a material change by risk appetite and name segment.
Both your risk data and customer names are indexed. This makes name screening and list-change screening computationally efficient at scale — hundreds of millions of names screened on a single deployment.
Watchlist screening is the process of checking customers, counterparties and other entities against sanctions lists, PEP databases and other regulatory watchlists to identify individuals or organisations subject to restrictions or enhanced due diligence. It is a regulatory requirement across all major financial jurisdictions.
Sanctions screening checks entities against lists of individuals, organisations and countries subject to trade or financial restrictions imposed by bodies such as OFAC, the EU or HM Treasury. PEP screening identifies politically exposed persons (individuals in prominent public roles) who may present elevated corruption or bribery risk. Both are required under AML regulations but serve different risk purpose
Ripjar's proprietary name matching resolves identity across 400+ languages, 20+ scripts and over 1 million+ name variants. It handles transliterations, aliases, diminutives and organisational name parts with 94% improvement over traditional fuzzy text matching (Levenshtein distance).
When a sanctions list is updated, Ripjar's continuous monitoring triggers an incremental review of affected entities. Only material changes generate new alerts — resolved matches are not re-screened, reducing noise and ensuring analysts focus on genuinely new risk.
Find out how your sanctions and PEP screening compares. Book a complimentary Screening Audit with a Ripjar specialist.