2024 has - once more - been a turbulent year in world affairs. But inside OpenSanctions, our steady focus has been to build out a sustainable company that can deliver a reliable product.
After spending time in 2023 building out our open source data framework, zavod, this year we took that engine out for a spin: from 96 datasets at the beginning of the year, we expanded our coverage of global sanctions lists, regulatory watchlists and PEP databases to 270 sources.
Mapping the world
Our data expansion has covered all four topical categories of the database: We’ve added 27 national sanctions lists, regulatory watchlists (like US medicare exclusion, financial crime watchlists from France to Malaysia), datasets of political office-holders (from Singapore to Denmark to the US federal government), and, finally, a broad range of special interest sources (including The Sentry’s fantastic Atlas project, identifiers for global research organizations and Russian banking licenses).
The OpenSanctions team climbing the data hill for you.
As our database content has evolved, we also worked to ease the way our customers can ingest it. We added a delta functionality to our service so that a full re-import of the dataset after each update is no longer required. And even deeper in our engine room, we also made a number of improvements to our yente self-hosted screening service, adding the option to use AWS’s OpenSearch as a back-end.
Inside the data framework itself, we also worked to add many fields for specific properties of companies, vessels and persons, improved data validation and cleaning for key identifiers and dates, and improved data lineage to make our processing even more transparent.
Building a sustainable business
None of this technical work would have been possible without the many new partnerships we started in 2024. The resulting threefold increase in revenue allowed us to build out new roles in the team: customer success and technical support, data QA, and financial operations.
We also built out an information security management system with ISO 27001:2022 certification in spring, and our infrastructure was subjected to its first independent security test. More recently, we introduced a change log to ensure our clients are aware of any upcoming changes to our data formats and our service more broadly.
Looking back, we’d like to say a big “thank you” to all of our partners and clients and also to everyone else who informed our knowledge of the world by engaging in our Slack channel or having their lawyers send us letters.
More to come in 2025!
