Our Australian PEP collection features over 2,600 entities. Photo: Lachlan Fearnley
We're in the middle of a sustained PEP list expansion drive, and we’ve recently picked up pace.
This is the result of several changes we’ve made to our data pipeline, including the increased use of LLMs — we recently wrote about how narrative-rich matching and extraction tooling is enabling us to bring in and integrate new sources faster.
We’re constantly receiving feedback from our global client base, including on how their respective regulatory environments are changing. One example is the changes to AML regulation in Australia — commonly referred to as Tranche 2 reforms — which take effect July 1, and we’re trying to be as responsive as we can be.
While we’re seeking to provide a global data collection that is relevant to financial crime fighters beyond changes in national legislation, it's a convenient moment to provide fresh insight into how we’re integrating data and what we’re currently working on deep within that infrastructure.
- All Australian state parliament members are now in the database, and sourced directly from each parliament's own website.
- Almost 300 local councillors across Australian states have been added through expanded Wikidata crawlers.
- Next up are Australian judges. We're using them as a test dataset for further work on PEP data acquisition infrastructure. This early-stage effort builds on PoliLoom, our crowdsourcing tool for filling gaps in politician data. Our goal is to capture and store a clean snapshot of any web page that contains a political officeholder and feed that snapshot to an LLM to extract structured data, eliminating the need for a bespoke web scraper for that specific site. We've laid out our thinking in our forum here.
Taken together, these are small, unglamorous dataset additions. But they're a fairly direct illustration of what the recent tooling investment buys us: the ability to go deep on a single jurisdiction's political structure — state, local, and soon judicial — without each layer requiring its own multi-month engineering effort.
Explore our Australia PEP collection here.
