Sanctions: The #1 Challenge in AML Today
July 2025
If we ask any compliance officer today what the most important topic is, I’m quite confident that the answer would be sanctions.
Today’s world is getting polarized from day to day and sanctions play a major role as a tool for governments to extend the authority and power to other players in the global scheme.
Sanctions are getting more and more complicated, the schemes and topics are updated frequently. It seems like a distant past when it was enough to check sanction lists from the official sources once in a while.
Now the new sanctions are coming every day, the obliged ones need to react within 24 hours, sanction schemes are getting complicated, and the fines are getting bigger. It all raises the pressure on the financial entities that operate both in EU and foreign markets.
It is becoming more and more crucial to have two aspects covered by the AML solution:
- A reliable and competent provider of sanction and risk data like LSeg with their WorldCheck solution
- A software solution that can effectively use the sanction data for screening the clients portfolio and transactions.
Scanning the names always was and still is a tricky endeavor. Since the names lack the semantical context and significantly differ in various languages, matching algorithm must constantly evolve to maintain precision and effectivity.
The balance between security that all positive matches are caught and yet minimize the generation of false positives that overwhelm human operators is more virtue and exact science.
We are DS are very well aware of this challenging topic and we have heavily invested in our AML solution to bring leading edge quality and reliability for our customers.