Sanctions data can be broken down as follows:

Sanctions Checking: Compliance tools now will ingest the sanctions lists from OFAC, EU, HM Treasury, and other regional bodies (EG Monetary Authority of Singapore), and match them with either vessels, companies, individuals.

Sanctioned Ownership Links: Taking the sanctions list above, and the ownership databases these compliance tools use, they have built signals that would highlight a relationship between a vessel and a sanctioned entity. Vessel ownership is often deliberately challenging to establish, so these signals are used to ensure that organisations can track the companies which may be linked to vessels or individuals which are on sanctions lists.

Sanctioned Port Calls: Tools will check if vessels have called into ports of sanctioned countries and flag. For example, a vessel calling into Bandar Abbas in Iran, as a sanctioned country, would be flagged.

Benefits

Understanding what vessels and their respective owners have been sanctioned is a strong foundation to ensuring that your own organisation doesn’t do business with them.

Avoiding fines and reputational damage is a key concern of any organisation, but particularly global banks for which the impacts can be extremely expensive.

Drawbacks

As per the various OFAC and EU expansions to regulation over the last 5 years, this is very much the baseline for the checks which need to be conducted.

Depending on your jurisdiction, some of the suppliers may not be ingesting the local sanctions lists.