With advance in technology, also comes increased expectations from regulatory bodies for companies to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. For instance, when it comes to sanctioned party screening, authorities now prioritize real-time compliance, contextual analysis and enhanced due diligence processes over ad-hoc list-matching.

To continuously support organizations in this area, multiple enhancements have once again been delivered to SAP Watch List Screening.

In this short blog, I have selected a few, but you will also find more details in the dedicated section of the SAP Help Portal: What’s New in SAP Watch List Screening

Delta Screening

If there is no predetermined timetable for sanction lists update but rather names and entities being added or removed by authorities as necessary and appropriate, one thing is sure: this is quite frequent with some lists being modified as regularly as daily. Not only to add or remove records, but to include additional details, aliases, updated addresses, etc.

And, if experts assess that the percentage of these updates is limited (some claim less than 1% of total records are updated daily), this still means a great volume of changes that organizations need to remain compliant with.

To do so, compliance departments can opt for 2 options:

• Systematic full rescreening of all records and entire sanction list set => this is the “bullet proof” approach – or at least as close as it gets of course, but equates in practice to a new full screening at every run so it is heavy and not efficient for ongoing monitoring
• Delta screening with targeted compliance measures that re-check only newly added or updated watch list records for potential sanction hits => with this approach, Compliance Officers benefit from faster, more focused checks, saving time and ensuring that newly added or updated data is promptly screened without missing potential risks

Full screening was already available in SAP Watch List Screening since the very inception of this service where documents were re-checked upon changes and further processing and business partners had an own scheduling report for full re-screenings.

Delta Screening has been added in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Edition 2602 and SAP S/4HANA On-Premise release 2025 FPS2. With Delta Screening, the changes in watch lists are monitored and trigger a screening re-run on customer information – request status, business partners, and documents.

Allow me to illustrate this with a simple example from the SAP Help Portal section for this enhancement:

A business partner is screened on creation, resulting in no hits. Therefore, the business partner is released. Some days later, a new watch list version is uploaded containing new watch list entries. SAP Watch List Screening now automatically screens the business partner against these new watch list entries and finds a hit and blocks the business partner. The next postprocessing run fetches this update and blocks the business partner in the system accordingly. In doing so, the screening status of the business partner (as well as the documents) stays up-to-date with watch list changes, ensuring consistency and compliance.

With delta screening, companies can:

Audit Trail

Full auditability of sanction party list screenings is often a legal requirement within sanction regulations. For instance, under 31 CFR Part 501 – Records and recordkeeping requirements, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) mandates that organizations “keep a full and accurate record of each such transaction engaged in”.

Complete logs of who performed the screening, what was screened, and when it took place help businesses accomplish just that: demonstrate compliance, manage liability, and foster trust by showing that processes are transparent and defensible.

To support this requirement, an new Fiori app has been released: Display Audit Trail.

With this app organizations – or their auditors – can display an audit trail for their screening requests and navigate to individual screening requests for further investigation:

Display Watch Lists

Following on the topic of audit, you may recall that we previously mentioned in a What’s new in SAP Watch List Screening blog the availability of Custom Watch Lists that organizations can upload in addition to the provided list.

Whether it be for predefined provided lists or custom lists, auditors, but also compliance managers and screening specialists have asked for the ability to access the details of the lists:

Auditors To audit and verify that the correct watch lists are in use

Compliance managers To assess the completeness and coverage of screening content and verify their custom lists post-upload

Screening specialists For support during an investigation to understand why certain names are flagged and pre-emptively analyse watch list contents

Here again, to help customers, a new Fiori app has been released: Display Watch Lists

With this app users can display all entries of the watch lists they are using:

Link back to original watch list source

Finally, and to close this blog on investigation by screening specialists, when a hit is generated, these experts need to verify if the associated entity is truly the one listed on the sanction party list. To do so, they often need to refer back to the original documentation – list from OFAC, United Nations, European Union, country specific… and many more! – where all attributes and comments are detailed, to ensure they enforce the right decision.

With the new capability to link back to the original watch list source, this step of the investigation is streamlined and handling time per alert due to manual searching reduced:

What about you, how does your company address these needs of constantly changing sanction lists and complex investigations? I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on this blog.

And if you are interested in learning more about SAP solutions for Governance, Risk, and Compliance, feel free to fill-in the demo request form!