What's happening at OpenSanctions? RSS
Updates from OpenSanctions, including new features, technical deep dives, and analysis.
This week, we are releasing version 4.0 of the FollowTheMoney (FtM) toolchain.
Sanctions Program Mapping: Better Transparency and Navigation
Imagine you're a compliance officer and your sanctions screening system flags one of your international clients as sanctioned. But what are the implications for you, and what actions need to be taken? That depends not just on who is sanctioned, but under which program.
More than a Technical Problem: Name Matching in Sanctions Screening
In many fields, a name is just one of many clues you can lean on to pin down an identity. But in sanctions screening, a name might be all you’ve got. This is one of the core parts of our work: matching the names of people and companies to those on global watchlists. It might be tempting to treat this as a purely technical task: choose an algorithm and press "run". But that’s only the beginning.
Registry Amnesia: How Russian Data on Sanctioned Companies is disappearing – and how we put it back.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the dictatorship has increasingly hidden and falsified data in its trade registry. We’ve churned through 100GB of compressed XML files, so that we can now present both: the current, memory-impaired version as well as the pre-war data.
Targeting the shadow fleet: a new download of sanctioned vessels
We've developed a dedicated export of sanctioned vessels that can be used for screening a fleet of ships against sanction risks.
OpenSanctions teams up with Neterium!
We are partnering with Neterium to help financial institutions screen large transaction volumes with quality sanctions data.
This was 2024 at OpenSanctions!
It’s time for us to look back on 2024 – a year that saw the biggest increase in our data coverage yet.
US Medicaid Exclusions - Going State by State
Over the past few months, we've integrated a new group of sources: US state-level Medicaid exclusion lists. They detail entities that have been barred from participating in Medicaid programs due to misconduct, fraud, or other violations.
EU sanctions data: addressing the publication delays
The European Council and Commission struggle to publish structured and easily accessible sanctions data in a timely manner. We're calling for this practice to be updated in order to make the restrictive measures more effective.
A Major Update to our On-Premise API Service
Yente 4.0 brings fast, incremental database updates and compatibility with AWS OpenSearch, making sanctions and PEP screening more efficient and easy-to-deploy.
Lists inside of lists: mapping the world of sanctions programs
What do the United States’ Burma-Related sanctions, Chinese Military Companies Sanctions, the Sectoral Sanctions Identifiers and the Foreign Sanctions Evaders have in common?
We’re now ISO 27001 certified!
After several months of learning and preparation, OpenSanctions has passed its first independent audit to ensure our organisation’s adherence to the ISO 27001 standard for information security.
GraphAware webinar: the challenge of investigating complex ownership structures
How to disentangle complex ownership structures with the help of data and knowledge graphs
How civil society organisations can use OpenSanctions to conduct screening checks
Many civil society organisations (CSOs) are required by their funders to conduct screening checks before they establish new relationships with contractors, new staff and other vendors.
OpenSanctions helps Guernsey FIU fight money laundering and drug trafficking
The Guernsey Financial Intelligence Unit uses the OpenSanctions dataset to screen money laundering alerts
This was 2023 at OpenSanctions – plus what’s next!
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time for us to reflect on our second year of operation - and to give you a little preview for our third.
When national security meets financial securities
We’ve built a new custom data export with sanctioned securities to make it easier to screen asset management portfolios for sanctions risks.
How we're mapping out politically exposed persons
We're taking the plunge and publishing our methodology on collecting PEP data to serve the industry as a potential reference point in a challenging area of compliance data.
Transparency Fabric: It takes a network to fight a network
The Transparency Fabric aims to combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and sanctions evasion by mapping GLEIF's universal entity identifier, the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), to both Open Ownership and OpenSanctions' datasets.
Announcing the logic-v1 scoring mechanism
OpenSanctions is constantly improving our services, and we’ve just released a new version of our API software, `yente`, that lets users try a new matching system.
New scoring modes in the OpenSanctions API
You can now select from a range of different algorithms that score your results when you use the OpenSanctions API to screen a set of companies and people.
Introducing our new Advanced Screening search
We're introducing a new advanced screening search, which lets you use multiple search criteria and fuzzy matching to identify watchlist entities.
StoryWeb: Experiments in building graph data from journalistic texts
We've been working on a simple tool for building networks of people and companies in the news out of media reporting. Until this can become an adverse media tool, signficant work remains to be done.
Expanding OpenScreening, powered by OpenSanctions KYB
Analyze and explore the relationships between beneficial owners, sanctions and politicians with OpenScreening, powered by OpenSanctions KYB data.
Understanding interrelationships in the ‘Security State’ in the Middle East
Canadian data scientist and activist Wael Alalwani wants to map relationships between members of what he calls the ‘Security State’ - business elites, political actors, army generals and others.
Introducing the new OpenSanctions API
As we’ve been speaking to businesses and organizations interested in OpenSanctions, we’ve seen a clear need amongst them for an easy-to-integrate, software-as-a-service API.
Digging into sanctioned companies using OpenCorporates
Both OpenSanctions and OpenCorporates provide powerful data building blocks for compliance. By linking our databases up, we make it easier to track assets or assess exposure.
Weaving a deeper sanctions web using data enrichment
We're adding linked data from the GLEIF company database and the ICIJ OffshoreLeaks to enrich the corporate targets in our system with relevant ownership or officership relations.
Self-hosted and extensible: the OpenSanctions API
In this post, we’ll explain how you can use our open source components to build a customized sanctions and PEPs matching service - on your own premises, with your own data, with complete privacy and meeting your own requirements.
Improving the way we score matching results
Our updated API uses a statistical model to determine if your query matches one of the entities in the OpenSanctions database. As we do this, we put a premium on transparency and share both the training data and scoring code.
What is next for OpenSanctions?
Since its launch last September, OpenSanctions has nearly doubled its scope to 204,000 persons and entities of interest from across 43 data sources.
Using graph analytics to find evidence of corruption
In cooperation with Linkurious, we worked to develop a network graph view of the database and demo how it can be used in anti-corruption investigations.
How-to: Using the matching API to do KYC-style checks
Know-Your-Customer (KYC) checks are a different challenge to normal text searches: your query is supposed to describe a person or company in some detail to allow the OpenSanctions API to check if that entity (or a similar one) is flagged.
We're now integrating persons of interest from Wikidata!
The structured-data Wikipedia offers a compelling source of information on many public persons. However, mining the site is not for the faint of heart.
The CIA lost track of who runs the UK, so I picked up the slack
A guest post from Tony Bowden about his efforts to build an open source dataset of world leaders inside of Wikidata, the structured-data version of Wikipedia.
How to sanctions-check a spreadsheet using OpenRefine
OpenRefine, a power tool for data cleaning, offers a way to quickly check hundreds or thousands of names against the OpenSanctions database to find the ones that might be persons of interest in an investigation.
Introducing business licenses for OpenSanctions
We are introducing business licenses for OpenSanctions as a way for companies using the data to support our long-term sustainability.
Using ICIJ DataShare to sanctions-check a document leak
OpenSanctions is a resource for journalists to find leads in document stashes. But in order to use it, you need a tool that can help you search sanctioned entities inside your documents.
How we deduplicate companies and people across data sources
A key function of OpenSanctions is matching and de-duplicating data from many sources. In this article, we discuss our approach to merging list duplicates.
Presentation: What is OpenSanctions?
Our colleagues at the OpenOwnership initiative gave us an opportunity to present a very quick introduction about the OpenSanctions project. Have a look at the recording!
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