How to use the PEPs, Sanctions and Adverse Media endpoints
What are PEPs, Sanctions and AM?
PEPs (Politically Exposed Persons), Sanctions and Adverse Media checks are critical components of a comprehensive screening process for new business customers in the financial services industry.
Our endpoints allow you to create these checks and monitor for any changes.
How do you use it?
There are two common use cases where the PEPs, Sanctions & AM endpoints can be used.
- Onboarding
- One-off check
If you are using these checks as part of the onboarding process, we recommend you do the following checks:
- Create a search for the entity you are trying to onboard.
The more accurate the details you’re able to provide, the better the rate of accuracy on the match - Start monitoring the entity you’ve searched.
This adds the entity you’ve searched to monitoring to list to track. Adding the search to this list is a prerequisite to tracking changes. - Retrieve differences to see if there have been any changes.
This provides any changes in the search from when the search was previously run to the day the retrieve differences endpoint was queried. - Acknowledge differences between the searches.
By acknowledging the differences raised between the two searches on the entity, this means that the next time you retrieve differences, it pulls the difference between the most recent change and the last acknowledged change. If you don’t acknowledge the difference, then the next time you retrieve differences it will be the difference from the first search you ran.
Once you create a search, we highly recommend you use that same search ID for all subsequent searches against the same entity. Rather than keep creating identical searches, new search IDs will count against your quota.
Please note, if you’re looking to onboard a company and would like to do an AML check on both the company and it’s directors or it’s UBOs, then you would need to create a search for each ‘entity’ i.e. each individual or company. These can be identified by calling our UBO and our Officers endpoints.
If you’re using the endpoints for one-off screening, then once the search has been created, you can delete the search. This is particularly useful when using the retrieve search endpoint, as deleting a search keeps your search list tidy, particularly if you’ve created any incorrect searches, for when you need to retrieve your search list and want to ensure they are all reliable search requests.