Sanctions Lists

Sanctions screening is a vital layer in your compliance and risk management process. Roaring’s Sanctions Screening API helps you proactively detect and avoid engagement with high-risk individuals, companies, or countries flagged for involvement in illicit activities. By integrating this API, your business can ensure full compliance with international regulations, reduce exposure to financial and reputational risk, and prevent dealings with prohibited parties. This supports secure operations while aligning your processes with global anti-crime and anti-terrorism initiatives.

Read more at Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (in Swedish): https://www.imy.se/verksamhet/dataskydd/det-har-galler-enligt-gdpr/personuppgifter-som-ror-lagovertradelser/

Key benefits:

• Real-time and automated screening
• Ongoing monitoring with alerts on updates
• Minimal manual handling for compliance teams
• Support for both name-based and personal identifier-based searches

Covers major international sanctions lists including:

EU:

• Consolidated Financial Sanctions List

OFAC (U.S.):

• Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN)

• Consolidated Sanctions Lists (CSL)

• Foreign Sanctions Evaders (FSE) List

• Sectoral Sanctions Identifications (SSI) List

• Palestinian Legislative Council (NS-PLC) List

• Correspondent Account or Payable-Through Account Sanctions (CAPTA List)

• Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions List (NS-MBS List)

• Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List (NS-CMIC List)

UN:

• United Nations Security Council Consolidated List

UK:

• OFSI Consolidated List of Financial Sanctions Targets

Switzerland:

• SECO Sanctions List (individuals, entities, organisations)

Use case:

A fintech company offering international payment services integrates Roaring’s Sanctions Screening API to ensure regulatory compliance and prevent illicit transactions. Whenever a user initiates a payment — whether personal or business — the recipient's name and details are instantly screened against global sanctions lists (EU, UN, OFAC, etc.).

The sanctions list organisations present information in different ways. We have created a unified response structure, so that a large part of the response is common to all sanctions lists. Here, the main information - names/aliases, birth date, reference number etc is presented in the same way for all lists.

In addition, the “sanctionsListsDetails” object holds all the information we have collected for each list.

The sanctionsListsDetails structure varies, depending on “type” = depending on sanctions list.

There are three types for the “sanctionsListsDetails”. The two lists which are added in version 3.0 (Swiss, UK) have their own types, while EU, OFAC, UN share one type.

NOTE that the EU, OFAC, UN “sanctionsListsDetails” corresponds to the response structure of the previous version of the api - Sanctions Lists 2.0.

Filtering could exclude some sanction list results

name must be filled in.

You can narrow your search down by defining values for sanctionOrg, birthDate, gender, country and entityType. Be aware that the underlying data about each target is not always complete. So do not narrow the search more than absolutely necessary. For example, information about "gender" does not always exist in the source. If gender is set to a specific value in the search, no targets with an "UNKNOWN" gender will be found.

Default search functionality: all words in name must match, to get a hit. This can be changed by setting separateNameSearch to true. With this seeting, there is a hit if any of the words in name match.

Fuzzy search is not default. It can be turned on by setting fuzzy to true.

fuzzyDistance: Default fuzziness is “AUTO”. Unless you have specific requirements, you can use the default. For "AUTO", the fuzziness factor increases with the length of the word you are searching for.

Setting of fuzzyDistance: allowed values: 0, 1, 2. 2 means that you will get a hit even if maximum 2 letters in each of the words in the name search field do not match the hit.

The searchScore in the response can be used to sort the hits. It is an indication of how well the hit matches the search parameters, in relation to the other hits in the response.