About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Lack of Consistent Sanctions and Risk Customer Screening Standards Exposes Firms to Heightened Compliance Risk

Subscribe to our newsletter

Many large financial institutions are failing to implement consistent policies and procedures for sanctions, Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) and customer risk screening due to inconsistent, legacy-based systems, according to compliance screening and data management specialists, Datanomic. Fragmented and inconsistent legacy platforms with different criteria and capabilities deployed across multiple departments and/or countries are resulting in substantial audit problems, impairing consistent enforcement of corporate policies. This fragmented approach is leading to potential failures in identifying sanctioned individuals and increased risk of fines from regulators.

In its recent report, “Financial services firms’ approach to UK financial sanctions”, produced by the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA’s) Financial Crime and Intelligence Division, the FSA highlights “many instances where country specific and/or business unit policies and procedures fail to meet the minimum standards set out in the group wide policy.” The report also indentified weaknesses in major financial groups’ systems and controls, which made it difficult for them to comply with their policies in relation to UK financial sanctions. These weaknesses often arose from the difficulties of operating multiple legacy IT systems across the group.

“Firms that operate in a number of countries, need a consistent group-wide policy to assist local business units in ensuring that their local procedures meet minimum group requirements,” said Simon Pearson, director of compliance screening at Datanomic. “We’ve seen numerous instances of large global financial giants risking millions in fines and penalties through their inability to flag individuals and entities adequately across countries, departments and systems. Both international and domestic screening regulations and compliance requirements have strengthened almost every year, yet only a handful of the large financial conglomerates have realised the need to implement a consistent system across all regions and departments to ensure 100% compliance and adherence to corporate policies and procedures.”

Many large firms are now in the process of devising or implementing a single firm-wide IT system to tackle these issues. Earlier this month, Barclays announced that it is standardising on Datanomc’s dn:Director Sanctions & PEP Screening software as its preferred solution for its next generation customer screening platform to combat the problem of inconsistent and disparate systems across its global operations. The Datanomic software will replace multiple customer screening solutions across many geographies and will provide Barclays with unparalleled accuracy for systematic screening in both Western and non-Western languages/character sets.

“Large globally dispersed financial institutions, such as Barclays, need a multi-disciplinary solution capable of creating and enforcing globally-consistent corporate policies and procedures,” added Pearson “All staff must be trained and held to the same standard, and this is only possible through the implementation of best-of-breed technology, incorporating screening software such as dn:Director that has the ability to work with both western and non-western scripts. Traditional text-based matching is insufficient for global screening, and contextual processing of cultural variations of both western and non-western script names is essential.”

To address the growing need for comprehensive global screening, Datanomic has integrated its dn:Director Sanctions & PEP Screening software with IBM’s Global Name Recognition (GNR) Technology to create the industry’s most powerful software solution for compliance screening. The fully integrated solution integrates GNR with dn:Director as a series of dn:Director processes, combining rich functionality that delivers accurate, systematic screening in both Western and non-Western languages/character sets.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Hearing from the Experts: AI Governance Best Practices

9 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes The rapid spread of artificial intelligence in the financial industry presents data teams with novel challenges. AI’s ability to harvest and utilize vast amounts of data has raised concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive proprietary data and the ethical...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of its Prestigious Innovation Awards 2025

The most innovative data and technology solutions for capital markets were recognised today as A-Team Group announced the winners of this year’s A-Team Group Innovation Awards 2025. Now in its fifth year, the prestigious awards recognise the innovative projects created across the vendor and practitioner communities that provide high-value solutions to organisations within capital markets...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...