About OpenSanctions

OpenSanctions is a financial crime data provider. We build and maintain an international database of persons and companies of political, criminal, or economic interest. We combine sanctions lists, lists of politically exposed persons, and other public-interest information from hundreds of sources into a single, structured, continuously updated dataset.

Our data is a component that sits deep in the technology stack of the financial services industry. Compliance platforms embed OpenSanctions into their screening workflows, investigation tools build graph analysis on top of it, and developers wire it into products that serve regulated industries. Researchers and journalists rely on it to track political conflicts and cross-border financial crime.

What we do#

We collect, clean, and integrate data from sanctions authorities, government registries, and public records worldwide. People, companies, vessels, and other entities are all mapped to a consistent data model, deduplicated across sources, and published with full provenance so that every data point can be traced back to where it came from.

This is harder than it sounds. Sanctions lists are published in dozens of formats and languages, names appear in multiple scripts, and the same person can be designated by different authorities under different spellings. Dates are ambiguous, corporate structures are opaque, and no two sources agree on how to represent an address. Turning these chaotic sources into a single reliable dataset requires specialized tooling, continuous engineering effort, and careful human oversight.

OpenSanctions updates from major sanctions authorities within hours of publication and we run entity resolution across sources, so that a person designated by OFAC, the EU, and the UN appears as one consolidated profile with each authority's data attributed separately. Where automation falls short, thousands of hand-crafted data patches correct parsing errors and fill gaps.

What makes us different#

Transparency. Our data pipeline is open source. OpenSanctions’ methodology is published, and every entity in the dataset is browsable on our website. Compliance teams can trace any data point back to its source. When regulators or auditors ask how your screening data is produced, you have something concrete to show them.

Depth of integration. We resolve entities across sources, link them to corporate registries, enrich them with identifiers (LEI, IMO, BIC, national registration numbers), and model relationships including ownership, family ties, political positions, and sanctions designations. The result is a structured entity graph that can be queried, traversed, and matched against.

Bulk data access. The full dataset is available for download and self-hosting. You can run our matching API inside your own infrastructure, which means customer PII never has to leave your environment.

The company#

OpenSanctions is headquartered in Berlin, with a team of data engineers, support, commercial and operations staff working across Europe.

Compliance platforms, fintechs, investigation tools, government agencies, and research institutions pay for commercial data licenses. That revenue funds the continuous operation and expansion of the database. There are no outside investors.

Our ambition is to build a component that is a pleasure to integrate: solid, precise, and reliable, with standard terms, clear and detailed documentation, bulk data you can actually download, and gaps communicated where they exist. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.

We hold ISO 27001:2022 certification and operate under a 99.8% uptime SLA.

Why we're open#

Sanctions data is public information published by governments so that it can be acted upon. The infrastructure for accessing that data should be held to the same standard.

Openness is our design principle. Because the data and its production are verifiable, hundreds of compliance integrations, investigative journalists, and academic researchers all scrutinize our work. That creates a level of scrutiny that a proprietary system cannot match. Our data is cited in major investigations, used by government agencies, and relied upon by companies whose own customers demand auditability.

Serving journalists and researchers is a deliberate quality mechanism. Investigative reporters have exacting requirements for data fidelity. If the data is wrong, they are the ones who end up in court. By continuing to build for the most demanding users, we raise the bar for everyone.

The aim is to build a dataset the industry treats as its default reference for sanctions, enforcement, and PEP data, and to earn that position through transparency.

History#

OpenSanctions started in 2015 as a freely available database to provide persons-of-interest data for journalists investigating financial crime. Its founder, Friedrich Lindenberg, was building data tools for newsrooms and anti-corruption organizations at the time, including at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

That work taught him that the reporters, activists, and researchers investigating financial crime had the sharpest understanding of what a high-fidelity entity database actually needs to do. It also turned out that a database built to those standards had applications well beyond journalism: in compliance, government, and the financial industry.

In 2021, with support from a grant by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF, Prototype Fund), we rebuilt the database to make it ready for commercial use — broader coverage, a consistent data model, and an update pipeline that could run reliably at production scale. OpenSanctions Datenbanken GmbH was formally established in 2023. The company has been operating on revenue since its incorporation and has grown to serve several hundred commercial customers across more than 90 countries.