Our first Meet the Experts webinar of 2026 explores the landscape of sanctioned securities and provides practical guidance on managing associated risks.
Closing the sanctions screening gap
As sanctions regimes continue to expand and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, it is essential for firms to move beyond traditional entity screening and identify sanctions exposure at the instrument level.
This is the key message from our webinar experts, who emphasised that firms must now be able to demonstrate clear visibility of instrument-level risk – a requirement that is often complex and challenging to achieve in practice.
The sanctions shift
The evolving sanctions landscape has resulted in increasingly stringent requirements governing what firms may trade, hold, clear or facilitate. As a result, a wide range of financial instruments, including bonds, equities, ETFs, indices, derivatives, now may fall within scope, as each may carry embedded sanctions risk.
At the same time, many organisations still rely on entity-level controls that weren't necessarily designed for today's capital market sanctions landscape, leaving them exposed to heightened risk.
To remain compliant, firms require granular sanctioned securities screening that is specifically focused on identifying prohibited or restricted financial instruments.
Haider Mannan, CEO of, BIGTXN, outlines how the scope of policy has expanded in recent years, while markets have simultaneously developed a far greater number of real-time touchpoints:
In an API-driven market, the time to detect risk has shrunk, because the time to complete a trade has shrunk. Firms can no longer rely on batch processing or static lists. They need to perform continuous, real-time monitoring.
Mannan further highlights the added complexity of indirect sanctions exposure:
Only about 30% of sanctions risk exists at the surface – the remaining 70% is implicit risk, and the bulk of complexity resides in this opaque basket, which is constantly changing. For example, we track over half a million corporate actions in the sanctioned securities database each week. No human is able to do that by manual processing alone.
All about data
Catherine Banks, Senior Solutions Consultant at LSEG, emphasises that screening must take place at multiple critical stages of the trade lifecycle, from pre-trade checks to onboarding, and continue on an ongoing basis. Monitoring should be continuous, or as close to real time as possible. In addition, event-driven developments, such as sanctions updates, M&A activity, or organisational restructuring, should trigger further review.
Data quality is equally critical. However, firms continue to face persistent challenges in this area, including incomplete issuer data, outdated ownership structures, and poor-quality identifiers. Each of these issues can create significant compliance risk.
When selecting a vendor, both quality and provenance of the data are essential considerations. Data must be thoroughly researched, properly curated, made available in a timely manner, and delivered in an easy-to-understand format that can be integrated into in-house systems. Today's trading environment is global in nature, so breadth of coverage is crucial. Identifier logic is also key consideration, as matching identifiers to entities is a complex process within itself.
Banks concludes:
These considerations are important, because ultimately the organisation is the one responsible for compliance – and data providers need to do everything they can to assist with that.
Regulatory focus
Regulatory priorities may evolve over time, but certain areas are likely to remain under close scrutiny. These include the use of internal overrides or the application of jurisdictional-specific interpretations. Regulators may also assess the effectiveness of controls through scenario-based testing and will often consider the broader risk culture within the firm.
Given this, watertight documentation is crucial. This should clearly capture the sources consulted, the screening logic applied, the ownership analysis undertaken and the relevant approvals obtained. Where possible, processes should be automated; however, appropriate human oversight must be maintained, and all activity should be fully auditable.
Find out more in the full webinar now available on demand.
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