Batch screening lets your organisation submit many customer records at once and have Elucidate automatically check each one against sanctions and PEP (Politically Exposed Person) watchlists. Instead of looking people up one at a time, your customer records flow in as a batch, are screened on arrival, and any matches are surfaced for your team to review.
You review the results on the Customer Data page, reached via Case Management > Customer Data.
What gets screened
For every customer record in a batch, Elucidate screens the identity information that matters for sanctions checks:
| What is screened | Description |
|---|---|
| Customer name | The name on the record (shown as User name) is checked as a full name. Longer names are also tried as a first + last combination, so a match is not missed when a middle name is present. |
| Watchlist (AML) entries | Any name entries attached to the record — the names your source system flags for screening — are each checked individually. |
These values are matched against the sanctions and PEP sources your institution has enabled, including OpenSanctions where it is switched on.
The other details on a record — gender, date of birth, ID type and issuing locations, the customer number, and the transaction date — are stored with the customer for reference but are not screened against watchlists.
How names are matched
Batch screening uses the same matching engine as the manual Watchlist Search and the transaction screening module — so a match found here is the same as a match found there. In short:
- Each name is broken into its individual words (tokens) and checked against the indexed watchlist names.
- Exact matching requires the name to appear verbatim, while Fuzzy matching also catches small spelling variations (for example Qaddafi matching Gaddafi, a single-character difference). The tolerance is tight and scales with word length, so wider transliteration variants are not caught, and neither engine converts between alphabets, so a Cyrillic name is matched against Cyrillic list spellings only. Which one applies depends on your institution's screening configuration.
- Every match carries a confidence score, so stronger matches stand out from weaker, partial ones when you review them.
For a full explanation of field types, tokenization, exact vs fuzzy matching, and how the match score is calculated, see the Watchlist Search & matching guide.
When screening runs
Records are identified by their customer number. When the same customer number is submitted again, Elucidate compares the incoming record with what it already holds and only re-screens when something relevant has actually changed. This keeps your alert queue focused on genuine changes and avoids duplicate work.
| Situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| A new customer record arrives | The record is screened in full. |
| The name, watchlist entries, or other identity details change | The whole record is screened again, so every value is re-checked against the current lists. |
| The record is re-submitted with no changes | Screening is skipped — the result would be identical to the previous check. |
| Only the transaction date changes | The updated date is saved, but the record is not re-screened, because who is being screened has not changed. |
In short: new or changed records are screened; unchanged re-submissions are not.
This covers what happens the moment records arrive. Separately, Elucidate also re-checks the customers you already hold whenever the sanctions lists themselves change — described next.
Daily screening for sanctions list changes
Sanctions and PEP watchlists change constantly: new people and organisations are added, and existing entries are updated. Because of this, a customer who matched nothing yesterday can become a match the moment a newly listed party is added — even though nothing about their record has changed.
To catch this, Elucidate automatically re-screens your customer records once a day, without anyone needing to re-submit them.
To keep the daily run fast and your alert queue focused, it does not re-check every customer against the entire watchlist each time. Instead it screens against the delta — only the sanctions and watchlist entries that were added or updated since the previous run:
| What is checked | Every customer record your institution holds. |
| What it is checked against | Only the watchlist and OpenSanctions entries that are new or have changed since the last daily run — not the entire list. |
| Why only the changes | If a customer only matches entries that have not changed, they were already screened against those entries before, so there is nothing new to find. Concentrating on what changed surfaces genuinely new matches quickly and avoids repeating the previous day's work. |
The daily check uses the same matching engine and the same exact/fuzzy settings as screening on submission, so a match it finds is exactly the kind of match you would see anywhere else in Elucidate.
When the daily run finds a new match — for example, a customer who now matches a freshly listed sanctioned entity — it raises a customer screening ticket in the same way, so your team is alerted and can investigate. Matches you have already reviewed and cleared (whitelisted) are not raised again, and no duplicate tickets are created.
Reviewing the results
Open the Customer Data page to see all customer records. The list shows whether each record is Sanctioned, and you can filter to focus on sanctioned records only.
Select any record to open its detail page, where you can see exactly what matched:
- A Sanctioned / Not sanctioned badge at the top gives you the record's status at a glance.
- The values that caused a match are highlighted and tagged with a Hit marker — so you can immediately see which name or watchlist entry triggered the alert, rather than guessing.
- The Sanction Information section lists the details of each match: the value that was screened, the source list it matched (for example OFAC or an EU list), the entity type, and when it was listed.
Alerts from batch screening
The first time a customer record is found to match a sanctions or watchlist entry, Elucidate raises a customer screening ticket so your team can investigate. If the same record is submitted again without changes, no duplicate ticket is created — you will only be alerted again if the record changes and a new match is found.
From there, the ticket follows the same review workflow as other customer screening alerts: you can assign it, add comments, categorise it, and resolve it once your investigation is complete.