Checks that stay current: screening and ongoing monitoring
A sanctions check goes stale when the lists change. Essence's screening is built to record what each decision rested on, re-screen when lists change, and keep the screened person's details in-country.
A company takes on a supplier in March and screens the supplier's directors against sanctions and watch lists. The result is clear. In June, one of those directors is added to a list. If the company screens only at onboarding, it will not know until it next looks, and that may be a year away.
A sanctions check tells you something true about the day it ran. Across our September and October releases we built screening into the Essence platform on the assumption that it has to stay true afterwards.
A decision that can be run again
Every screening decision is recorded with its basis: which list was used, and which version of it. Our design notes give the reason in one line: a verdict an examiner cannot re-run is not evidence. With the list and version pinned, the same question can be asked again against the same data.
Screening is wired into the parts of the platform that need it: organisation and partner onboarding, the parties to a trade consignment, counterparties in trust and safety checks, and supplier screening. Where screening cannot run, those checks fail closed. Silence is never read as a clear result.
Details that stay in their country
Screening a person means comparing their name and other details against lists. Sending those details to a central service would take them out of the country instance that holds them.
So the platform moves the list instead. The list data travels to each instance and the screening runs there, and the screened person's details stay where they are held. Hashing names would not offer a way round this: matching against sanctions lists has to cope with spelling variation and transliteration, and a hashed name cannot be matched that way. For an organisation under data residency rules, screening properly and keeping personal data in-country stop pulling against each other.
Re-screening when the lists change
Each time a new version of the list data arrives, the platform re-screens the people it monitors, starting from what changed rather than repeating every check in full, and raises a finding where something has moved.
Two rules keep the results honest. The re-screen never invents a verdict: a person removed from a list is recorded as withdrawn from it, not as clear, and every re-screen goes through the real screening service. And changes in the list data decide only the order of checks, never who is checked. The ordinary rotation still reaches everyone, so a failed lookup can delay a check but cannot cause anyone to be skipped.
Monitoring the person can see
Being monitored should not be invisible to the person monitored. Since our October release, a person can see the monitoring they are under: which organisation enrolled them, against which list sets, from when and until when.
They can see only their own. There is no way to ask about anyone else, because whether a named person is being monitored is exactly what someone probing another person's vetting would want to know. The view is treated as a data-rights request, so it is never gated behind an entitlement, metered or capped.
A check made at onboarding then keeps up with the lists for everyone you monitor, with a record of what each answer rested on. If screening is part of your onboarding or supplier checks, we would be glad to show you how it would fit your process.
Published 15 October 2026