---
title: "When national security meets financial securities"
summary: "We’ve built a new custom data export with sanctioned securities to make it easier to screen asset management portfolios for sanctions risks.\n"
url: "https://www.opensanctions.org/articles/2023-12-04-securities/"
date_created: "2023-12-04T00:00:00.000Z"
date_updated: "2024-03-28T17:44:35.247Z"
tags: ["Securities","Screening"]
image: "https://www.opensanctions.org/assets/fb90b76c-3f19-4a69-828d-b65fd9add292/"
---

When you imagine a sanctioned company, it’s easy to think of a Maltese shell corporation registered at a shady law firm’s offices, set up to facilitate the smuggling of arms on behalf of Assad’s Syria. But increasingly, international sanctions are being applied to large, publicly traded companies - for example, in the Russian financial and heavy industry sectors. What’s even more: with [Executive Order 14071](https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/1128), the US government has created a general investment ban against Russian securities.

<img class="img-fluid" src="https://assets.opensanctions.org/images/articles/wallst.png">
<p class="img-caption">
    Sanctions also apply to financial instruments, including the purchase and sale of stock in 
    certain companies.
</p>

This, of course, creates a problem for asset managers and everyone else involved in the trade of financial securities: which transactions have to be blocked? Unfortunately, sanctions list-makers and asset managers speak in very different languages: the US OFAC lists [only mention 160-odd securities identifiers](/search/?scope=sanctions&schema=Security). Most of the identification of companies is instead done by name and jurisdiction.

That’s why we decided to apply some [data enrichment](/articles/2022-06-16-enrichment/) to the problem: after previously including Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) and some ISIN mappings via the [GLEIF database](/datasets/gleif/), and Russian securities identifiers via the [NSD (National Settlement Depository)](/datasets/ru_nsd_isin/), we’ve now also integrated [PermID/RIC data lookups](/datasets/permid/) provided by LSEG (formerly Refinitiv, formerly Reuters), and [OpenFIGI identifiers](/datasets/openfigi/) (published by an entity that suspiciously looks like Bloomberg in a trench coat).

On top of that, we’ve built a new custom data export: [Sanctioned securities](/datasets/securities/). The data distribution includes all companies designated by the US, UK, EU, Switzerland and Australia, and combines them in a simple CSV file format that indicates all the available financial identifiers available for each entity.

This allows us to demonstrate a proposition that OpenSanctions was very much built for: being an open data nexus that combines multiple sources in a way that makes more sense out of them, and then providing the result in a way that is extremely easy to use.

More information:

* Custom dataset: [Sanctioned securities](/datasets/securities/)
* Documentation: [Securities data in OpenSanctions](/docs/data/securities/)
* [Get in touch](/contact/) to subscribe for commercial use