How transactions are checked, held, and released.
Every payment you followed in Learn passes through screening checkpoints. This academy explains the control side: the lists, the matching, the investigation, and the governance — always from the defender's perspective.
Sanctions foundations
What sanctions are, who imposes them, what obligations they create, and how sanctions screening differs from AML monitoring and fraud detection.
List data & identifiers
The anatomy of a sanctions list entry, the identifiers that drive match confidence, and how list updates and aggregation work.
Screening execution
Customer versus transaction screening, the screening lifecycle, name matching, secondary identifiers, message screening, and system architecture.
Investigation & governance
Alert investigation, false-positive management, screening governance, and how programmes are tested and tuned responsibly.
The Screening Lab
ALL 6 CASES →Walk real-shaped, fully fictional cases from alert to disposition: see why a name matched, which evidence mattered, and how an analyst documents the decision.
- A clean pass through the filterMost payments pass screening untouched: the filter generates weak candidates, scores them, and discards them below threshold without any human involvement.
- A common surname collides with the listA high name score on a common name is a starting point, not a conclusion — date of birth and geography are what separate the customer from the listed person.
- The alias that was the real nameListed persons rarely transact under their primary list name — a well-maintained alias set is what catches them, and secondary identifiers are what confirm it.
- Strong name, wrong person: identifiers decideA near-perfect name score cannot outweigh hard identifiers — date of birth and passport data on the list entry are what let you rule a customer out decisively.
The tuning dilemma
OPEN THE DIAL →An interactive, defensive model of precision versus recall: move the match threshold and watch true matches caught, false positives raised, and analyst workload change together.