Maritime Compliance became noteworthy in the early 2010’s after a series of significant fines for a number of financial institutions, with specific mentions of sanctions breeches from Maritime Activities.

This has subsequently been built upon with a series of memorandums from OFAC which expanded their targeting beyond financial institutions to the wider maritime ecosystem including; Shipping, Insurance, Commodity Trading, and Energy Companies and added a new requirement to identify ‘deceptive shipping practices’.

As a result of these regulations, there are a number of suppliers which have built platforms and associated data feeds to help companies assess, identify and prevent engagements with vessels known/suspected to have engaged in illicit activities.

We have broken these down into the following categories:

Sanctions: Companies which aggregate and map sanctions to vessels, companies and individuals. These sanctions are typically aggregated from OFAC, HM Treasury, EU and other authorities lists. In addition to this, suppliers can provide records of port calls into sanctioned countries.

Vessel Screening: An enhancement on sanctions checks which dive deeper into a vessel’s activities to identify potential ‘deceptive shipping practices’ including dark activity, potential ship to ship transfers, or potential dark port calls.

Dual Use Goods: This refers to a database of goods which are classified by departments of governments as controlled exports, which may have uses in military or other controlled areas.

Automated Compliance Screening: Suppliers of these services have produced technologies which can automate the sanctions and compliance screening process, usually by parsing data from a bill of lading provided to a bank or financial institution and running it through all of the required checks.

Credit Reports: Financial risk is a key consideration for companies looking to supply goods or services. Suppliers continually produce credit reports with a specific focus and expertise on the maritime ecosystem to help their clients mitigate this.

Within the purview of risk, there are also four different categories of incident data:

• Casualty Data

• Vessel Inspections and Detentions Data

  
  

• Seizures and Arrests