Watchlist Scope

Product tiers

Watchlist categories

Sanctions & enforcement

Refresh rate: Every 15 minutes  ·  Coverage: Global

Socure supports 1,400+ sanctions and enforcement lists worldwide. These help teams comply with regulatory requirements by screening individuals and businesses against global authorities such as OFAC, UN, EU, and others.

Politically exposed persons (PEP)

Refresh rate: Every 24 hours  ·  Coverage: Global

Our PEP database contains 2 million global profiles. Customers can choose which PEP classes to include, based on risk tolerance and compliance obligations.

PEP classes (1–4):

• Class 1 – Heads of State, US Congress, etc.
• Class 2 – Senior officials of the military, judiciary, etc.
• Class 3 – Senior management & board of state-owned enterprises, etc.
• Class 4 – Mayor and local county, city, and district assembly members

Adverse media

Refresh rate: Every 24 hours  ·  Coverage: Global

Adverse media monitoring scans 100,000+ news sources in their original languages. Categories such as fraud, corruption, and terrorism are aligned to FATF predicate offences, helping compliance teams detect reputational and legal risks early.

Custom watchlists

Coverage: Organization-defined

Screen against proprietary or internal lists using the same matching and monitoring engine as Socure's global watchlists. This supports tailored risk controls for businesses with unique compliance needs. You can manage entries in the RiskOS™ Dashboard, through the Custom Watchlist API, or by bulk CSV upload.

For setup steps, see Custom Watchlist. For API details, see the Custom Watchlist API reference.

Performance metrics

The model supports multiple layers of matching — exact, fuzzy, phonetic, rule-based, and ML-driven (LSTM) — to maximize detection accuracy across names, formats, and languages.

• API match times: Near real-time
• Monitoring alerts: Sent immediately after source updates are processed
• Quarterly uptime: 99.99%

What to know before you build

• PEP profiles may include placeholder URLs if the original government source has been removed or expired. The source_url field may be present, but the link may not resolve. This does not affect the validity of the match.
• Source data refresh rates depend on the origin — some lists update every 15 minutes, others daily and, others less frequently. Socure handles ingestion and versioning, but update latency can vary by jurisdiction.
• The API returns candidate matches based on fuzzy and exact logic. You’ll need to build a review layer on top of these responses to confirm if a match is a true positive.
• Entities on your accept list are suppressed from alerting, unless a material change is detected (e.g., a new DOB or alias that increases identity confidence).
• If an entity moves from one list to another (e.g., PEP → sanctions), it may appear as a new match due to different context or risk classification.
• Sandbox calls return mock data and do not access live watchlist sources. Use sandbox for request validation and error handling — not for testing real match behavior.