How marketplaces can screen business sellers, directors and owners against sanctions lists, handle possible matches and keep screening current.
Screening an individual seller is fairly simple: one name, one date of birth, one result. Business sellers are harder. There is the company itself, its directors, the people who own or control it, and sometimes other companies in between. Each is a name that could appear on a sanctions list.
This post covers what to screen, which lists matter in the UK, how to handle possible matches without drowning your team, and why one check at signup is not enough.
This is general information, not legal advice. For your own sanctions obligations, see the GOV.UK guidance linked below and take professional advice.
There has been a recent change here that many teams have not caught up with. The UK Sanctions List covers designations made under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, and GOV.UK states that since 28 January 2026 it is the only source for UK sanctions designations. The OFSI Consolidated List of financial sanctions targets has closed (GOV.UK).
If your screening process, vendor contract or internal policy still refers to the OFSI Consolidated List, it is worth updating. Many marketplaces with international sellers or payment partners also screen against other lists, such as US and EU ones. Which ones you need depends on where you operate and who you work with.
For a company seller, a sensible baseline is:
Screening only the person at the keyboard misses the point. Sanctions risk often sits with who owns or controls the business, not who manages the account. Our post on directors, PSCs and UBOs explains the difference. [Planned URL, live on publication.]
Name screening produces possible matches. Common names, transliterated names and partial matches all create noise. A process that sends every possible match to a person will build a backlog fast.
Some practical rules:
Use more than the name. Date of birth, nationality and entity type cut false positives sharply. A company should not match a person; a person born in 1990 should not match one born in 1950.
Score matches, do not just count them. A strong match on full name plus date of birth is very different from a partial name match with nothing else.
Separate "no match" from "not screened". If the screening service was unavailable or a name could not be checked, that is not a clear result. Treat it as review.
Record the decision. When a person clears a possible match, note why. You will need that if the question comes up again.
In TrustVerify's KYB check, a registry-verified UK company and its active officers are screened through OpenSanctions. Matching uses material-hit scoring: weak candidates and wrong-entity-type candidates (a person matching a company, for example) are discarded and counted, rather than shown as hits. The screening result comes back as clear, review, hit or not_screened, and a check that could not screen does not pass. See the UK KYB guide.
For individuals, the AML and PEP guide covers sanctions, PEP and watchlist screening. TrustVerify also offers adverse media screening.
PSCs can be screened individually where that is enabled, with each result reported as Clear, Review, Match or Not screened. ## Screening once is not enough
Sanctions lists change. People are added, and sometimes removed. A seller who was clear at onboarding can become a match months later.
Ongoing monitoring re-checks people you have already screened and tells you when something changes. TrustVerify supports ongoing PEP and watchlist monitoring (see the monitoring API reference). New matches can be pushed to your system with the aml.hit webhook event, and aml.monitor.suspended tells you when monitoring for a subject has stopped. Our post on KYC webhooks and decision handling covers how to receive and verify these.
A confirmed match is a compliance event, not a fraud review. At a minimum:
The exact steps depend on your obligations, so agree them in advance with your compliance lead or adviser. Do not leave a reviewer to work it out on the day.
You can test how your system handles matches without using genuine personal names. In the TrustVerify sandbox, an AML check on a name containing "sanction test" returns a match and "pep test" returns a potential match. See our sandbox post for more. [Planned URL, live on publication.]
If you are setting up screening for business sellers for the first time, work through these questions with your compliance lead:
Answering these on paper first makes the technical integration much simpler, because you know what each screening result should trigger in your system.
If you only remember a few points from this post, make them these:
None of these points requires a large team or a long project. Most can be put in place in a few weeks, and each one makes the next decision easier to explain.
See how screening fits into onboarding and monitoring for business sellers. Read about TrustVerify AML screening.
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