Compliance Blog

Written By JiJi Bahhur, Regulatory Compliance Counsel

OFAC has improved its SDN search tool by employing what it calls “fuzzy logic” on its name search field.  Fuzzy logic uses character, string, and phonetic matching when returning results from an SDN search.  The other fields on the tool use only character matching.

For those of you who don’t know what an SDN search is or what this improved tool would be used for, it is explained in the FAQs accompanied with the release of the improved tool.  Specifically, FAQ #9 reads:

“SDN Search is a free tool provided by OFAC to assist the public in complying with sanctions programs. It is intended to be used by individual users that are looking for potential matches on the SDN list. It should not be utilized by automated systems that are configured to continually run searches through the tool. For a copy of files that can be easily interpreted by automated systems and software programs, please see the list of XML, CSV, PIP, DEL, and FF files on the SDN page.”

The search tool and the FAQs on it can be found here.

If you’ve never used OFAC’s SDN search tool before, try it out.  I did!  And thankfully the whole compliance team here at NAFCU came out match-free!  Phew!