Watchlist
Organizations in various industries are facing pressure from regulators to better identify their customers, associates, and partners as they manage risk and profitability. Middesk's risk and compliance suite provides multi-sourced data and configurable regulatory and risk services to help identify entities associated with money laundering, terrorism financing, white-collar crime, and other unusual activities in support of your Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) programs.
The Anti-Money Laundering, Counter-Terrorism Financing Rules and Global Official List checks assist in identifying the risks associated with individuals due to specific or general involvement with Money Laundering (AML), Terrorism Financing (CTF), Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), terrorists and wanted criminals.
Today, Middesk supports the following sanctions lists, including those on the Consolidated Screening List. If you would like additional lists added to the product, please reach out to [email protected].
| List | Organization |
|---|---|
| Entity List (EL) | Bureau of Industry and Security |
| Denied Persons List (DPL) | Bureau of Industry and Security |
| Military End User (MEU) | Bureau of Industry and Security |
| Unverified List (UVL) | Bureau of Industry and Security |
| ITAR Debarred (DTC) | State Department |
| Nonproliferation Sanctions (ISN) | State Department |
| Capta List (CAP) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Foreign Sanctions Evaders (FSE) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Non-SDN Menu-Based Sanctions (NS-MBS) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Non-SDN Iranian Sanctions (NS-ISA) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List (NS-CMIC) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Non-SDN Palestinian Legislative Council List (PLC) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
| Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List (SSI) | Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) |
How Middesk helps with Watchlist screenings
Middesk runs watchlist screenings against all businesses created in our system. Given that watchlists commonly lack unique identifiers, Middesk leverages its identity matching tools to determine if an entity matches any of the records available on all of the mentioned sanctions lists. Middesk will provide you with the status of each individual screening list result and will flag any potential matches for you to review in further detail.
In addition to the granular details about each watchlist, Middesk will also summarize the watchlist search as follows:
| status | label | sub_label |
|---|---|---|
| Success | No Watchlists hits were identified | No Hits |
| Failure | X Watchlists hit(s) have been identified | Hits |
Middesk also offers several configuration options to reduce false positives, including:
- Date of Birth Filter for Submitted People
- Entity and Individual Name Fuzzy Match Tolerance
- Selecting specific federal agencies and watchlist lists to run business names and individuals against each business
The parameters of the Watchlist tolerance or matching threshold can be adjusted to either Low, Medium, or High for entity and individual names in the dashboard settings:
- Low: This parameter allows for an edit distance of zero, which will be a strict match to the exact name of a given entity/individual in the watchlist to produce a hit. An exact match is defined as when any of those business and/or people names (or an alias of each name) contain words that are present in any of the names of an entity found in any of the watchlists.
- Medium: This parameter allows for an edit distance of one, which means a watchlist hit will be surfaced if the search term differs from a name of a given entity in the watchlist by one character/letter.
- High: This parameter will be the most risk-averse option, however, this setting will likely result in more false positives by relaxing the fuzzy matching parameters.
In order to configure your watchlist settings, visit the settings page in the dashboard. The configuration selections will be applied globally across all businesses.
For more information about Watchlist or the Date of Birth Watchlist Filter, view our reference or reach out to [email protected]
Watchlist List Refresh
Middesk's Watchlist lists are pulled from official government lists each day at 3:00 AM PT (the government website refreshes their data at 2:00 AM PT, so this gives their process time to complete, while still almost immediately pulling the results). A job then kicks off to ingest the lists into the database to be searched against ( ~3:30AM PT).
If the lists fail to be pulled or ingested into our database, there is automated alerting to escalate to the engineers and work to resolve the issue immediately.
Updated about 9 hours ago