The Complete Guide to Sanctions

As the battle against global financial crimes continues, the efforts to hinder the progression of newer, more effective criminal activities are constantly evolving and increasing to meet growing challenges. In years past, the primary focus had been to simply keep organizations and their client-bases secure. However, as new pervasive threats to financial security continue to emerge on the global platform on a regular basis, today's financial service providers are faced with much greater responsibility. Quite often, new compliance regulations are introduced in response to current money laundering and terrorism financing exploits seen across the globe, ultimately shifting the regulatory landscape at both national and international levels. While these regulations allow financial institutions to reduce their susceptibility to financial crime and avoid potential damage to their international reputation(s), they also can prove to be rather burdensome for compliance departments of said institutions. In many cases, businesses that fail in remaining compliant face significant consequences, such as issuance of severe monetary fines and sanctions against them, and occasionally the revoking of banking licenses for breaches of anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. In order to avoid these repercussions, banks have turned to increases in the designation and allocation of funds, manpower, and other resources to aid in the regulatory compliance cause, often hampering the ability of other departments in an institution to effectively perform their respective duties. Thus the need for advancement of cost-effective alternatives to manual processes, such as the use of cutting-edge automated systems to improve upon this cycle are vital, specifically when taking areas of critical importance, with histories of considerable complexity and high potential for error, such as the screening and filtering processes, into account. Sanctions and Watchlist screening & filtering processes have evolved into two of the more vital areas of focus for financial institutions (FI's) worldwide in regards to their abilities to continue the battle against financial crime while remaining compliant with the latest anti-money laundering (AML) and counterterrorist financing (CTF) regulations seen today. Yet the screening process can be quite a formidable task, and must be managed effectively to ensure that no criminal activity has gone undetected. Written by esteemed writer Dominic Suszek, an expert with a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the financial services sector and a groundbreaking figure in the now-thriving anti-money laundering software community, The Complete Sanctions Guide offers a thorough template for understanding and managing one of the of the more intricate areas of regulatory compliance seen today, sanctions compliance. This comprehensive guide is the fourth in a series of compliance literature published by Suszek, CEO of the thriving AML/CTF software fixture Global RADAR Solutions, and the first to primarily spotlight several of the ever-evolving areas of sanctions compliance including OFAC compliance requirements, penalties, and risk assessment, Foreign Terrorist Organizations, sanctions screening technology available on today's market, and individual sanctions histories, measures, and applications for the United States, United Nations and the European Union, respectively. With progressive industry insight and up-to-date information found from cover to cover, The Complete Sanctions Guide is the first handbook of its kind that offers the potential to drastically alter the sanctions compliance capabilities of financial institutions around the world simply based on the sheer amount of indispensable information held within.