Sanctions work is screening, list management, escalation and advisory against OFAC, EU, UK OFSI, UN and local regimes. The discipline covers name and transaction screening tuning, false-positive reduction, ownership and control analysis, licence applications, and the advisory calls that decide whether a payment or relationship can proceed at all.

Entry is typically the screening alert queue, where the skill is disposition quality: reading a hit against the underlying list entry and the payment context rather than the name string alone. Senior roles move into tuning and testing, programme design across multiple regimes, and the advisory seat that owns the escalation. Deep familiarity with a screening platform and with ownership rules is what differentiates candidates.

This is the most geopolitically reactive discipline in financial crime: designations move without notice, and institutions staff for the ability to absorb that. Live role and employer counts for sanctions are shown below, and enforcement activity that touches sanctions is tracked in Intel.