Plain answers to the questions businesses ask about sanctions screening and about the Montyris Sanctions Screening App.
About sanctions screening
What sanctions screening is, why every business that moves money, goods, or services across borders needs it, and what happens when it isn't done.
Sanctions screening is the process of checking the names of the people, companies, vessels, aircraft, banks, ports, and other parties you do business with against official government sanctions lists. The goal is to identify, before a transaction happens, whether any counterparty is subject to asset freezes, trade restrictions, or other prohibitions imposed by authorities such as OFAC, the UN Security Council, the EU, or the UK.
Sanctions are a primary tool used by governments to enforce foreign policy and national security objectives. Doing business with a sanctioned party — even unknowingly — can result in criminal prosecution, multi-million-dollar fines, frozen assets, loss of banking relationships, and severe reputational damage. Screening is the mechanism that allows a business to demonstrate it took reasonable steps to comply.
Sanctions obligations apply far beyond banks. In the United States, OFAC guidance makes clear that every U.S. person and entity — citizens, residents, companies, and their foreign branches — must comply. The EU, UK, UN, Canada, Australia, and most other jurisdictions take the same approach: every business operating in or trading with a jurisdiction is expected to screen. That includes importers, exporters, freight forwarders, law firms, real estate agents, manufacturers, fintechs, and crypto exchanges.
Penalties are severe and well-documented. OFAC and OFSI routinely issue multi-million-dollar fines to non-financial businesses — shipping companies, tobacco firms, sports academies, and music distributors have all been penalised in recent years. Many cases end in criminal indictments of executives. Even where the breach is unintentional, strict-liability regimes mean that "we didn't know" is not a valid defence.
Sanctions lists cover a much broader range of subjects than most people realise. Designations can apply to individuals (politicians, oligarchs, terrorists, criminals), companies (banks, shell companies, state-owned enterprises), vessels, aircraft, ports, economic free zones, industry sectors, and — increasingly — cryptocurrency wallet addresses. Every listing has its own restrictions, from full asset freezes to narrow sectoral prohibitions.
Constantly. Major authorities such as OFAC, OFSI, the EU, and the UN update their lists multiple times per week. Names are added, removed, amended, or moved between programmes. A business that screened a counterparty six months ago and hasn't re-checked cannot assume its status is still the same — which is why continuous monitoring of bookmarked records matters as much as initial screening.
Each regime has its own designating authority and legal basis. OFAC (US Department of the Treasury) administers US sanctions, which have strong extraterritorial reach through the US dollar and US persons rules. The UN Security Council issues consolidated sanctions that all member states must implement. EU sanctions apply across all EU member states and EU economic operators. UK sanctions are administered by OFSI under HM Treasury. The lists often overlap, but each has its own scope and exemptions — so "global screening" requires checking all of them, not just the most familiar one.
Secondary sanctions target non-US persons who do significant business with US-sanctioned parties. Even a non-US company with no direct US nexus can find itself cut off from the US financial system — or added to the SDN list itself — if it facilitates transactions for a designated entity. This is why many businesses outside the US still treat OFAC compliance as mandatory.
A false positive is a match the system flags that turns out not to be a real sanctioned party — usually a common name, a namesake, or a spelling coincidence. Every false positive consumes reviewer time, and platforms that generate too many of them make ongoing compliance unsustainable. Reducing false positives without missing true hits is one of the core quality metrics for any screening tool.
KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are broader onboarding and monitoring programmes that cover identity verification, source-of-funds checks, and suspicious-activity detection. Sanctions screening is one specific control inside those programmes — the check that asks "is this party on a prohibited list?" Every regulated business needs both; sanctions screening is the narrowest and most binary of the checks, but also the one with the harshest penalties for failure.
About the Montyris app
Setup, bookmarks, alerts, privacy, pricing, and coverage — everything you need to know before downloading.
No. Montyris is a standalone app designed around direct screening. You can install it, enter names, and review results without any technical setup, API configuration, or integration project.
No. Montyris is explicitly built for businesses that need sanctions compliance but were priced out of enterprise platforms — importers, exporters, freight forwarders, law firms, consultancies, manufacturers, real estate agents, crypto exchanges, and other non-financial sectors with genuine screening obligations.
The app covers consolidated global lists including OFAC (US), HM Treasury / OFSI (UK), the European Union, the United Nations Security Council, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan, and more — a total of 13 jurisdictions and 18 primary sanctions lists at launch, with coverage expanding as new programmes are added.
Yes. The app supports bookmarked records, watchlist-style monitoring, and automated email notifications whenever a hit appears on a watched name or a bookmarked record's status changes on any source list.
A bookmark saves a record for ongoing monitoring — you receive alerts if that record changes status or a new hit surfaces. A flag marks a record for internal review workflow attention (escalation, approval, periodic re-check) without necessarily triggering automated alerts. Together they let you distinguish between "watch this" and "action this".
The engine combines fuzzy matching, phonetic encoding, cross-script transliteration, and contextual ranking to account for typos, name-order swaps, transliteration variants across Arabic / Cyrillic / Chinese / Latin scripts, and legal-form differences. Each hit carries both a match score and a risk score so reviewers can prioritise effectively.
Common names return multiple candidates by design — missing a real hit is far worse than surfacing a few namesakes. The engine uses inverse-weighting on generic tokens (so "bank" or "holding" don't dominate the score) and ranked results, combined with context filters such as country, date of birth, and identifier, to help you narrow candidates quickly.
Yes. The app is not limited to individuals and companies. You can screen vessel names and IMO numbers, shipping entities, aircraft, crypto wallet addresses, economic free zones, and other counterparty types that appear in international trade, logistics, and digital finance workflows.
The app is built for both occasional checks and higher-volume screening. Pricing tiers scale with screening volume, starting at an entry level appropriate for small firms and extending to plans suited for regular operational use.
Continuously. The app tracks updates to major sanctions lists on an ongoing basis, so results reflect the latest available data from OFAC, OFSI, the EU, the UN, and other authorities without any action on your part. Changes to bookmarked records trigger alerts automatically.
Yes. Every screening result can be exported as a professional PDF report that documents the search, the sources checked, the matches found, and the decision recorded — suitable for regulatory audits, internal compliance files, and sharing with counterparties or counsel.
Yes. The app is built with a privacy-first approach: your queries, bookmarks, and audit trail are confidential to your account. The app helps you meet GDPR principles such as data minimisation, security, and purpose limitation by processing only what is necessary for screening and keeping your data secure within your account.
Trade and logistics (freight forwarding, customs, shipping lines), manufacturing and technology (exporters, component suppliers), professional services (law firms, accountancies, consultancies), real estate, energy and commodities trading, fintech and crypto, and financial services. Anywhere counterparty due diligence is a legal or contractual requirement.