Sanctions against Russia
Due to the situation in Ukraine, numerous countries worldwide are imposing a growing list of sanctions against Russia, including companies and individuals. New Russia sanctions are being announced almost daily and the number of Russian individuals and Russian companies sanctioned is growing. Meanwhile, a similar, growing set of sanctions applies to companies and individuals from Belarus, a Russian ally bordering on both Russia and Ukraine.
What are sanctions?
What do we mean by sanctions? Sanctions are political and economic measures that increase the forcefulness of diplomatic efforts by countries, multilateral or regional organisations. They can target states, organisations, companies and individuals. Sanctions apply to economic, cultural, trading, or diplomatic relationships. Examples are travel bans, trade bans, sports and cultural boycotts. The Russia sanctions introduced in the past week fit into all these categories.
Why impose sanctions?
The principal purpose of sanctions is to change the behaviour of the target country’s regime, individuals or groups in a direction which will improve the national or international situation. All recent UN and EU sanctions contain information as to why they have been imposed and specify what their aim is. The Russia sanctions introduced in recent weeks have the purpose of isolating Russia and making it harder for Russia to finance its military activities.
What is a Sanctioned Person?
A sanctioned person is any individual, group, regime, entity or thing listed by the sanctioning national government or international organisation as specially designated, prohibited, sanctioned or debarred. The sanctioned person is subject to limitations or prohibitions. The Russia sanctions target politicians, business owners and companies as well as people and organisations in the worlds of sports and culture.
Are you violating Russia sanctions?
If your company does business with sanctioned Russian companies or individuals, you are violating the sanctions against Russia. The same goes for doing business with companies or individuals on the Belarus sanctions list. Your company risks serious consequences, ranging from massive fines to heavy reputational damage. This applies even if you did not know you were dealing with a sanctioned party. Therefore, it is essential to find out who falls under the Russia sanctions. But with the sanctions lists relating to Ukraine growing by the day, how do you make sure you have the latest information?
Pascal sanctions screening
Of the sanctions screening tools in the market, Pascal is the best. You get access to the sanctions screening function within Pascal, a unique compliance and risk decision support platform built by data analytics company Vartion. Pascal automatically updates the lists almost in real time, so the sanctions-related information you get on your Russian and Belarus clients is the most reliable in the market.
What else can Pascal do?
It’s an indispensable tool for any company that needs to screen its customers and suppliers to avoid operational and reputational risks. Financial services companies use it to remain compliant with “Know Your Customer” (KYC) and “Customer Due Diligence” (CDD) regulations. Using Vartion’s powerful search engine and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, Pascal discovers hits and patterns in Big Data, sanctions and PEP lists, company data in corporate registers and news data in multiple languages. It quickly provides information on clients that’s detailed, reliable, relevant and consistent, so that compliance screening staff can take well-founded decisions. What’s more, Pascal can also perform 24/7 monitoring on selected clients. With this option switched on, after you’ve checked a client once, you never have to repeat the check again: Pascal will send you an alert of any change in the client’s situation.
How does Pascal do this?
Pascal ‘s first trump card is the huge and steadily growing database that it has created in-house and updates on a continuous basis. It contains the very latest versions of all the relevant sanctions and PEP lists and global corporate register data, plus masses of news data scraped daily from publicly available media in multiple languages – including sources like:
- Wikileaks
- Paradise Papers
- Panama Papers
- Pandora Papers
- Suisse Secrets
- FinCen files
- Luanda Leaks
- Mauritius Leaks
Pascal ‘s second trump card is the powerful self-learning search engine that it uses to search the database. This search engine, also developed in house, has artificial intelligence technology that enables it to actually read and understand running texts and extract relevant information. Looking at the most urgent issue of today, finding individuals and companies affected by the Russia sanctions is a quick and easy task for Pascal.
What does the user get?
When the search is done (which only takes a few seconds), Pascal presents a list of hits with relevance and risk ratings, as well as an overall risk score for the client. The whole 360 degree check, in other words, and the perfect outline for a formal risk assessment. If your client falls under Russia sanctions, the full report will certainly highlight this, and label the client as high-risk.
What makes Pascal different?
Unlike other compliance screening tools, Pascal:
- Produces a minimum of false positives
- Uses AI-driven adverse media tagging
- Uses a proprietary data lake of media, guaranteeing extremely fast search
- Features powerful relevance and confidence scoring
- Is extremely easy to use
- Has been developed by finance and risk professionals as well as IT experts
Why do companies need Pascal?
With today’s Russia sanctions, compliance is more challenging for companies than ever. But sanctions are only a part of the regulatory burden that companies bear. The volume of legislation and regulation that companies must comply with, both national and international, is getting bigger by the day, and the requirements are getting stricter. Failure to comply increases the risk of prosecution and fines. As such, compliance and proper governance are key to a company’s very survival. Moreover, with the volume of publicly available data exploding, companies run increasing reputational risks from adverse media. At the same time, however, compliance tasks like client screening are becoming increasingly time-consuming and complex. Pascal makes them far faster and more reliable.
What Pascal cost?
Pascal has a different pricing model from most tools. No up-front investment is needed, except for implementation and training. This is because Pascal comes as a Software-as-a-Service solution. You can pick and pay for the services and data modules that your organisation needs. It’s all negotiable. This means Pascal is flexible, scalable, always up to date and optimally secure. A highly cost-efficient solution, certainly considering the yield on process efficiency.
Be sure. Be right.
Be sure to make the right decisions and stay on the right side of legislation and regulations. That’s what compliance processes are all about. Put your trust in Pascal, Vartion’s AI-powered compliance support platform.