How sanctions and PEP screening works
Ustawi screens clients against sanctions and politically-exposed-person (PEP) lists from inside the same platform the loan runs on, so a genuine hit is surfaced in the compliance workflow rather than lost between two disconnected tools. Screening never auto-clears or auto-rejects anyone — it raises an alert for a human decision.
When a client is screened
Screening runs against borrower identity data — and, where those apps are enabled, guarantor identity data — at onboarding, and can be configured to re-screen periodically. Because it draws on the NIDA identity information already captured during customer due diligence, screening does not ask staff to re-enter anything; it checks the record that already exists.
What a match looks like
A match (a screening hit) is a possible correspondence between a client's details and an entry on a sanctions or PEP list. A hit is not a conviction and not a determination — name overlaps are common. What the platform does is flag the possible correspondence and raise an alert, leaving the true-match judgement to a compliance reviewer.
The resulting alert
- The alert is timestamped and attributed, so there is a record of when the hit was raised.
- It is routed to designated compliance staff for review rather than shown to the originating officer as an open task.
- It stays open until a compliance decision resolves it — the platform will not clear it automatically.
- Every action on the alert is written to the audit log for the tenant and, on request, its supervisor.
The platform surfaces hits; it does not decide them. Whether a hit is a true match, and what to do about it, is a compliance judgement made by the tenant institution's own staff.