Scalable Sanctions Screening Systems for High-Throughput Financial Transaction Processing
Keywords:
Sanctions Screening Systems, Financial Crime Prevention, Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Counter-Terrorist Financing, High-Throughput Transaction Monitoring, Compliance Detection Algorithms, False-Positive Rate Optimization, Real-Time Screening Architectures, Data Freshness Management, Financial Data Quality and Provenance, Scalable Compliance Platforms, Large-Scale Transaction Analytics, Risk-Based Screening Frameworks, Heuristic Compliance Design, Performance-Aware Detection Systems, Regulatory Technology (RegTech), Enterprise Compliance Architectures, Automated Watchlist Screening, Financial Systems Scalability, Trustworthy Compliance Operations.Abstract
Sanctions screening is critical for preventing terrorism financing, money laundering, and organized crime. Effectively enforcing compliance in a high-throughput environment, such as screening billions of financial transactions per year for a large bank, poses a unique challenge. Achieving a balance between matrix-like false-positive rates, detection times, and data freshness is central to the problem, which requires careful consideration of detection algorithms and their underlying data sources, together with the system's overall architecture.
A heuristic review identifies the main design considerations and explores each category in turn—screening architecture, detection algorithms, data quality and provenance, and overall scalability and performance. The results synthesize best current practice and highlight areas for further research
