Laws and regulations enacted in order to prevent the abuse of a nation’s financial system by organised crime and terrorist groups are an important priority for any civilised society. 

Over the past decade, United Nations resolutions and domestic equivalents designed to combat crime and terrorism have imposed an increasing operational burden on the financial services industry. 

Sanctioned Individual and Sanction Entity list screening have become a standard operational protocol at financial institutions and money services companies.  Financial Institutions rely on proprietary datasets drawn from a variety of sources to be consolidated and pre-conditioned to be suitable for automated name screening in account opening, account maintenance, and transaction processing scenarios. 

Civil libertarians and privacy advocates have raised concerns that the screening processes adopted by Institutions have become opaque, and practitioners worry that the proprietary list data they rely upon for their processes expose their institution to litigation risk. 

The Open Sanction Data Project's Subscription Service seeks to improve transparency within the financial services industry by providing a free and open source alternative to commercial, closed-source feeds of globally-consolidated Sanction List databases.

The Subscription Service will be launched in Q4, 2011.