Skip to main content Skip to navigation

The State of Financial Crime 2024: Download our latest research

ComplyAdvantage Releases The Evolving Use Of Sanctions 2021 Report Highlighting Current Issues Related To Global Sanctions Regimes

The Report Delves Into Key Issues In Global Sanctions Today Including The Rise And Use of New Sanction Regimes In Certain Geographic Hot-Spots 

New York, NY August 17, 2021 – 6am EST ComplyAdvantage, a global data technology company transforming financial crime detection, today announced the release of The Evolving Use of Sanctions 2021 Report, a timely research study intended to help banks, fintechs and other financial service providers quickly understand key sanction issues in order to take strategic, risk-sensitive decisions in response.  

Over the last century, the use of sanctions has changed dramatically, evolving from a tool of economic statecraft to become one of the most common and nuanced forms of political and economic action. Ignited by a broad-range of geopolitical dynamics, today’s constantly shifting sanctions landscape continues to create daunting challenges for compliance teams striving to keep their sanctions policies current.   

Because of these complexities, the potential for risk exposure as it relates to sanctioned jurisdictions, individuals, and organizations may increase significantly for businesses that are under-informed.

“’Sanctions have long been a tool of statecraft, but in recent years they have become more widely used, and with greater focus and nuance than ever before,” said Matthew Redhead, Managing Director, Policy and Campaigns at FINTRAIL.  “Businesses need to understand their sanctions responsibilities to ensure not only to meet their obligations, but to play their role in helping prevent global dangers such as weapons proliferation, human rights abuse and corruption.’”

To address these key sanctions-related concerns, The Evolving Use of Sanctions 2021 Report details critical geopolitical risks, sanctions evasion, and the development of national policies in major global financial centers.   

Key highlights

  • Sanctions regimes continue to have broad ranges of tools at hand, right up to national and sectoral embargoes. But more focused tools, such as asset freezes and travel bans against individuals, are becoming more widely used. 
  • Countries targeted by sanctions are increasingly adept at sanctions evasion techniques and are looking at ways to utilize emerging financial technologies such as Virtual Assets (VAs) to help them. 
  • China has begun to develop its own autonomous regime that includes “blocking rules” and is designed, in conjunction with other aspects of evolving Chinese policy, to support its national security and economic statecraft objectives.
  • Many transacting businesses are continuing to struggle with this problem, using legacy screening platforms that are often cumbersome, difficult to change, and produce significant amounts of false positives. 

“At ComplyAdvantage, we continue to focus our efforts on providing best-in-class hyperscale risk intelligence coupled with timely informative research to help transacting businesses reduce their exposure to financial crime related risks,” said Charles Delingpole, Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage.  “In the case of global sanctions, we knew it was important that we distill down the most pressing issues so that our customers could take appropriate action to reinforce their compliance strategies.” 

Already the preferred choice of some of the world’s largest banks, enterprises and high-growth fintechs, ComplyAdvantage uses machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organizations manage their risk obligations and prevent financial crime. The company’s proprietary database is derived from millions of data points that provide dynamic, real-time insights across sanctions, watchlists, politically exposed persons, and negative news. This reduces dependence on manual review processes and legacy databases by up to 80% and improves how companies screen and monitor clients and transactions.

About ComplyAdvantage 

ComplyAdvantage is the financial industry’s leading source of AI-driven financial crime risk data and detection technology. ComplyAdvantage’s mission is to neutralize the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption, and other financial crime. More than 500 enterprises in 75 countries rely on ComplyAdvantage to understand the risk of who they’re doing business with through the world’s only global, real-time database of people and companies. The company actively identifies tens of thousands of risk events from millions of structured and unstructured data points every single day. 

ComplyAdvantage has four global hubs located in New York, London, Singapore and Cluj-Napoca and is backed by Goldman Sachs, Ontario Teachers’, Index Ventures and Balderton Capital. Learn more at complyadvantage.com.

For ComplyAdvantage:

North America

Tim Donovan

+1.510.593.0064

[email protected]

EMEA

Ben Goldsmith

+44.0.7788.295321

[email protected]