Sanctions are a strict-liability risk: a single missed match can mean a breach, a frozen relationship and a regulatory conversation you did not plan for. Yet most screening estates carry the opposite problem too, a flood of false positives that buries the genuine hits and exhausts the people clearing them. An independent sanctions screening review answers the question your board and supervisor will eventually ask: are you screening the right names against the right lists, with matching tuned so that real exposure is caught and analysts are not drowning in noise.
Alsina Advisory delivers these reviews as a focused, senior-led boutique. We are independent of your screening vendor and of any tuning or managed-service provider, so our findings on coverage, thresholds and alert quality are objective and carry weight with your board and national competent authority. We work across the EU, rooted in the Netherlands, and frame every finding against the sanctions regime that binds you and the way your regulator examines screening.
What a sanctions screening review covers
We examine the whole screening chain, from the lists you load to the alerts you close, because gaps in one part undermine the rest. A typical engagement covers six areas, scoped to your customer base, payment flows and risk profile.
Name and payment screening
How you screen customers at onboarding and in periodic refresh, and how real-time screening sits across payment and transaction flows, including inbound and outbound messages and the fields actually inspected.
List management and coverage
Whether you screen against the EU consolidated sanctions list, UN designations and every other regime that applies to you, how quickly updates are loaded, and how internal and ownership-derived lists are maintained.
Matching and thresholds
Your fuzzy-matching configuration and similarity thresholds, transliteration and alias handling, and how the settings balance false positives against the far costlier risk of a false negative.
Ownership and control
Whether screening reaches beyond named designated persons to entities owned or controlled by them, including the 50 percent ownership test and aggregated and indirect holdings.
PEP and adverse media
How politically exposed persons are identified, classified and risk-rated, and whether adverse-media screening is calibrated to surface relevant findings without overwhelming analysts with irrelevant hits.
Alerts and governance
Alert handling, escalation, four-eyes review and audit trail, together with the governance, model documentation and periodic testing that keep the screening framework defensible over time.
How the review works
Scoping
We start with a short scoping conversation about your customer base, payment flows, screening tools and the regimes that bind you, then agree the scope, timeline and a fixed fee or day rate in writing up front.
Evidence and testing
We review configuration and procedures, interview the operators and second line, and test live output: closed alerts, list-update lag and seeded match cases rather than relying on self-assessment.
Threshold and coverage analysis
We probe matching thresholds and list coverage directly, assessing whether real designations and ownership structures are caught and whether the false-positive burden is proportionate.
Reporting
You receive a clear, prioritised report that any board member or supervisor can follow: findings, root causes, risk ratings and pragmatic recommendations on coverage, tuning and alert quality.
Independent re-testing
Where you need it, we re-test remediated thresholds, list coverage and alert handling and provide independent confirmation that the gaps have been closed.
What you get
Why an independent review
Independence is the point. Screening configuration is often set, and then defended, by the same vendor or team that built it, which is precisely why a board or regulator wants an outside view of whether the thresholds are right. We have no screening tool to sell and no tuning contract to win, so our findings on coverage and matching are objective.
As a senior-led boutique, your engagement is run by an experienced financial crime auditor who has seen how these estates fail in practice, not handed to a bench of juniors. That means sharper findings on the things that matter, the missed ownership structure, the threshold set too loose or too tight, fewer people in your environment, and a report you can stand behind in front of your national supervisor.
Whether you need a one-off independent review, pre-examination readiness or assurance after a tuning exercise, we can usually scope and start within weeks.