Name Screening

Screening starts at onboarding, before an account is opened, and covers more than the customer: beneficial owners, directors, signatories and sometimes payment counterparties. The names are compared with sanctions lists, politically exposed person lists and often adverse media sources. The match logic is usually fuzzy, so spelling variants are caught. Once the relationship is live, the lists keep changing, so screening continues. Batch screening re-runs the whole customer base against the latest lists, often overnight or whenever a list is updated. Event-driven screening checks an individual when something changes, such as a new director or address. Alerts go to analysts, who compare dates of birth, nationality and other identifiers before they clear or escalate. Name screening looks at who the parties are on file, not at what they are doing. A late match can mean an account served a listed person for years before anyone noticed.

A private bank onboards a trading company and screens the company, its two directors and its 40% shareholder, all clear. Six months later a regulator adds one director to a sanctions list. The bank’s nightly batch run picks up the new entry the same day, raises an alert, and the compliance team freezes the account and files the required report.