OFAC screening is not optional for financial institutions with US dollar exposure. The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control administers the Specially Designated Nationals list, the primary US sanctions list, and the consequences of transacting with a listed individual or entity include civil penalties, criminal prosecution, and loss of access to the US financial system.
For Australian financial institutions, fintechs, and any business processing USD transactions or dealing with US counterparties, OFAC screening is a legal requirement, not a discretionary compliance measure.
The SDN list is publicly available and updated daily by the US Treasury. The challenge is building a screening process around it that is accurate, auditable, and integrated into your onboarding and transaction monitoring workflows, not just a periodic manual check.
What the SDN list actually contains
The current SDN list has 19,152 entries. These are not all individuals. The list covers individuals, corporate entities, vessels, and aircraft that have been designated under US sanctions programs.
Each entry carries one or more program designations. These tell you why the entity was designated. Programs include country-based designations such as RUSSIA-EO14024, UKRAINE-EO13685, IRAN, and CUBA, as well as thematic programs covering narcotics trafficking, weapons proliferation, cybercrime, and terrorism. An entity can appear on multiple programs simultaneously.
The entry also includes aliases: the names under which a designated individual or entity may operate. This is the part that makes manual screening inadequate. A designated individual may have a dozen name variants, transliterations, and aliases. A keyword search against a single name form misses the others.
The name matching problem
OFAC screening is a name matching exercise, and name matching is harder than it looks.
A customer presenting as "Muhammad Al-Rashid" may appear on the SDN list as "Mohammed Al Rashid", "M. Alrashid", or a transliteration variant. An exact-match search against the customer's presented name misses all of them.
Effective OFAC screening requires fuzzy matching logic that handles transliteration, name order variation, common spelling variants, and abbreviation. It also needs to be calibrated so it does not produce so many false positives that every screen requires manual review.
This is why building OFAC screening on top of a raw SDN list download is more complex than it appears. The list itself is straightforward to download. The matching logic that makes it useful for production screening is where the engineering effort sits.
The audit trail requirement
OFAC screening is not just a technical process. It is a documented compliance process. For AML and sanctions compliance, the question is not only whether you screened. It is whether you can demonstrate when you screened, what result was returned, and what decision was made based on that result.
For regulated entities, this means every screen needs to generate a structured log entry: the name screened, the list version used, the match result (clear or matched, with match details if applicable), the timestamp, and a unique identifier linking the screen to a specific onboarding or transaction event.
A manual download of the SDN list and a spreadsheet search cannot produce this. An API call with built-in audit logging can.
What the Tech Compass OFAC Sanctions API provides
The API screens against the current OFAC SDN list, updated daily from the US Treasury. Current coverage is 19,152 entries.
Each screen call accepts a name and optional additional parameters (nationality, date of birth, entity type) to reduce false positives. The response returns a match result, the matched entry details if applicable, the SDN type, the program designations, and any aliases that triggered the match.
Every call generates an audit log entry before the response is returned: the name screened, the SDN list version used, the match result, the timestamp, and a request ID linking to the immutable audit log. Your AML documentation has a traceable record of every screen your platform performs.
The data lineage block on every response includes the US Treasury source reference and the list publication date, so your compliance team can confirm exactly which version of the SDN list was used for any given screen.
What OFAC screening alone does not cover
The SDN list is the primary US sanctions list. It is not the only list relevant for a cross-border compliance program.
Organisations with exposure to non-US jurisdictions, including EU counterparties, UK-connected transactions, and entities with UN Security Council designations, need screening against additional lists. The EU Financial Sanctions Files, the UK OFSI list, and the UN Consolidated List each cover designations that do not appear on the OFAC SDN list.
If your compliance program requires multi-jurisdiction sanctions screening, Tech Compass also provides a Multi-Jurisdiction Sanctions API covering OFAC, EU, UK, UN, and DFAT Australian sanctions in a single screen call. That is a separate product. The OFAC API here covers the US SDN list only, which is the right starting point for organisations whose primary sanctions exposure is US-related.
Pricing and access
Free tier covers 10,000 calls per month with no credit card required. Professional plan is USD 1,500 per month and includes the full SLA, daily list refresh, audit logging, and compliance pack.
Documentation is at api.techcompass.com.au/docs. The compliance pack includes data lineage documentation, the US Treasury source reference, and a pre-filled vendor questionnaire response confirming unrestricted commercial redistribution of OFAC data.
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Free tier covers 10,000 calls per month. No credit card required.
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