Streamlining Sanction and OFAC Review from Submission Packages for Property, Specialty & Marine, and GL Risk Managers

Streamlining Sanction and OFAC Review from Submission Packages for Property, Specialty & Marine, and GL Risk Managers
Risk managers across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction carry a non-negotiable responsibility: prevent violations of economic sanctions while keeping underwriting and claims moving. The challenge is that broker submissions, policyholder info, and sprawling entity lists routinely arrive as unstructured PDFs, scanned attachments, and email chains. Hidden inside are multiple legal names, DBAs, vessels, subcontractors, beneficial owners, and vendors that all require rapid screening against OFAC and other sanctions registries. Delays pile up, false positives multiply, and the risk of a missed hit never fully goes away.
Nomad Data’s Doc Chat was built to eliminate these bottlenecks. It ingests entire submission packages and claim files, automatically extracts all people, companies, vessels, and related identifiers, and then cross-checks them against internal and external sanctions sources with page-level citations. With Doc Chat, you can ask in plain language: list every named insured, subsidiary, DBA, subcontractor, vessel, and owner; identify the domicile jurisdiction; and screen them against OFAC SDN and SSI lists, BIS Entity List, and other watchlists. The result is a consistent, defensible screening process that moves from days to minutes and stands up to audits.
The nuance of sanction screening for a Risk Manager in Property, Specialty & Marine, and GL
Sanctions exposure is not confined to international cargo or complex financial lines. In property, marine, and construction programs, sanctions risk often hides in the details:
- Property & Homeowners: Named and additional insureds listed on ACORD 125 and ACORD 140, SOVs for hundreds or thousands of locations, mortgagees and loss payees, property managers, and large vendor panels. Addresses, country-of-origin indicators, and parent-company structures are frequently inconsistent across documents.
- Specialty Lines & Marine: Vessel names, IMO numbers, flag states, port agents, freight forwarders, and charterers embedded across broker submissions, charter parties, certificates of origin, and bills of lading. Beneficial ownership changes and corporate re-domiciling add complexity. Marine endorsements and P&I-related correspondence may reference new parties late in the process.
- General Liability & Construction: Layered insured structures with GC and subs across ACORD 125 and 126, COIs, master service agreements, and vendor onboarding packets. Subcontractor rosters change monthly; DBAs and trade names are common, and cross-border suppliers may enter mid-project. Joint ventures and partnerships complicate ownership screening against OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule.
Across these lines, a risk manager must handle both breadth and depth: many names across many document types, evolving relationships during policy and claim lifecycles, and a regulatory environment where even inadvertent dealings with sanctioned entities can trigger penalties. Screening is required pre-bind, at renewal, when adding insureds or vendors mid-term, and again before claim payments or salvage vendor engagement.
How the process is handled manually today
Most teams still rely on time-consuming steps spread across email, Excel, and browser tabs. A typical manual workflow looks like this:
- Open broker submissions and attachments: ACORD applications (125, 126, 140), SOV spreadsheets, loss run reports, W-9s, corporate registration certificates, vessel documents, sub-contractor rosters, and COIs.
- Manually extract names and identifying details: legal names, DBAs, addresses, tax IDs, owners/officers, vessel names and IMO numbers, mortgagees, loss payees, lienholders, vendors, and beneficiaries.
- Normalize and deduplicate: reconcile minor spelling differences, transliteration issues, and diacritics; guess at likely duplicates; hunt down missing country or jurisdiction fields.
- Search OFAC SDN and SSI lists, plus other watchlists: copy and paste each entity into government sites, public watchlists, or a third-party tool; repeat for alternate spellings and aliases; document decisions in spreadsheets.
- Interpret gray areas: identify ownership structures and apply OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule; research parent companies and affiliates scattered across the submission; track every check performed for audit.
- Re-run checks later: repeat screening when endorsements add new named insureds, when marine routings change, or before issuing claim payments to new vendors or salvors.
This manual approach is slow, expensive, and error-prone. Analysts get buried in repetitive data entry, hiring does not scale well during peak seasons, and fatigue increases the chance of missing a variant name or alias. Worse, these processes often leave thin audit trails, making post-incident reviews painful for compliance, legal, and regulators.
How Doc Chat by Nomad Data automates sanction and OFAC review end to end
Doc Chat is a suite of AI-powered agents that read like seasoned insurance professionals. It ingests entire submission and claim files at once, understands the context of each document type, and extracts all relevant parties for screening and monitoring.
Purpose-built extraction for insurance submissions
Doc Chat is trained on the documents that risk managers deal with every day:
- Broker submissions: ACORD 125 (general), ACORD 126 (GL), ACORD 140 (property), cargo and hull questionnaires, marine declarations, schedules, and endorsements.
- Policyholder info: corporate registries, W-9s, beneficial ownership forms, organization charts, SOVs, loss run reports, environmental and construction vendor rosters, and MSAs.
- Entity lists: named and additional insured schedules, subcontractor lists and COIs, mortgagee and loss payee schedules, vessel and equipment schedules, and bordereaux.
It auto-detects people, companies, DBAs, vessels and IMO numbers, addresses and jurisdictions, officers and owners, and role types such as mortgagee, loss payee, port agent, freight forwarder, or subcontractor. It resolves duplicates and variants (for example, handling diacritics and transliterations) and builds a canonical list ready for screening.
Screening against watchlists with evidence you can trust
Once entities are extracted, Doc Chat connects to the sanctions data your team relies on. Many clients integrate public and commercial sources including OFAC SDN and SSI lists, the BIS Entity List, US State Department lists, UN and EU consolidated lists, and HM Treasury. Doc Chat performs fuzzy matching, alias resolution, and risk-scored candidate matching. Every flagged hit is accompanied by page-level citations back to the source documents and clear links to the watchlist entries for rapid verification.
Because Doc Chat provides real-time Q&A, risk managers can ask questions like: list all entities with country of origin outside the US and show their screening status; show all owners at or above 25 percent and indicate whether the OFAC 50 Percent Rule could apply; list vessels flagged under high-risk jurisdictions; or identify any subcontractors added after inception who have not yet been screened. Answers are instant and traceable.
AI compliance check against OFAC insurance: what risk managers need
Searches for AI compliance check against OFAC insurance reflect a desire for speed without sacrificing defensibility. With Doc Chat, the screening logic mirrors your compliance playbook. We codify your decision rules, lists, and escalation thresholds so the system executes consistently across Property & Homeowners, Specialty & Marine, and GL portfolios. You can implement separate presets for pre-bind screening, mid-term adds, and pre-payment checks in claims.
Nomad’s approach is not a one-size-fits-all tool. We tailor the extraction and screening steps to your desk-level workflows, including customized output formats for evidence packages and compliance attestations. This delivers both high accuracy and high adoption by your frontline teams.
How to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions without disrupting underwriting
Teams looking to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions worry about interrupting underwriting cycles. Doc Chat slots into your existing process in days, not quarters. Start by dragging and dropping PDFs, Excel attachments, and emails directly into Doc Chat for immediate value. As comfort grows, integrate with intake portals, document management systems, and policy admin platforms via modern APIs. The system can auto-run screening on new submissions, endorsements, or claim vendor adds and push results into the system of record with structured fields and a clean audit trail.
Business impact: time, cost, accuracy, and risk reduction
The benefits of automating sanctions and OFAC review with Doc Chat compound across lines of business and across both underwriting and claims:
- Cycle-time acceleration: Reviews that once took hours or days per submission compress to minutes. Risk managers get fast, defensible answers and move work forward without leaving compliance exposed.
- Cost reduction: Eliminating manual extraction and repetitive list checking trims loss-adjustment and operational expense. One employee handles far more volume, and surge capacity is easy to absorb without overtime.
- Accuracy and completeness: Machines do not get fatigued on page 1,500. Doc Chat reads everything, enforces consistency, and surfaces every person, entity, and vessel reference. It reduces both false negatives and false positives with alias handling, fuzzy matching, and human-in-the-loop verification where required.
- Defensible compliance: Page-level citations, date-stamped logs, and repeatable logic make audits and regulatory reviews faster and lower-risk. When a question arises months later, the system shows exactly what was screened and why decisions were made.
- Fewer downstream issues: Catching sanctions conflicts early avoids mid-term cancellations, reputational damage, claim-payment blocks, and regulator attention.
For a deeper look at speed and auditability in complex insurance document workflows, see Nomad’s customer story with Great American Insurance Group, which highlights how page-linked answers accelerated complex claim review and increased trust across compliance and audit teams. Read the recap here: Reimagining Insurance Claims Management: GAIG accelerates complex claims with AI.
Why Nomad Data is the best partner for sanctions screening at scale
Nomad Data’s Doc Chat stands apart for insurance-grade scale and specialization:
- Volume: Ingest entire submission and claim files containing thousands of pages and dozens of attachments in one go. Reviews move from days to minutes without adding headcount.
- Complexity: Sanctions exposure hides in inconsistent policy documents, endorsements, ACORD apps, SOVs, marine schedules, and long email trails. Doc Chat surfaces every reference to coverage, liability, damages, and counterparties so nothing slips through the cracks.
- The Nomad Process: We encode your playbooks, document types, and escalation thresholds. The result is a personalized solution that mirrors the workflows of risk managers in Property & Homeowners, Specialty & Marine, and GL.
- Real-time Q&A: Ask Doc Chat to summarize, extract, or cross-check entities. Get instant answers with direct links back to the exact page in the file where each name was found.
- White glove service and rapid implementation: Our team delivers hands-on setup, testing, and user enablement. Typical implementation is 1–2 weeks, so value is realized immediately.
- Security and governance: Nomad maintains enterprise-grade security controls including SOC 2 Type 2 practices. We provide full traceability for every answer, which supports auditors, reinsurers, and regulators.
Explore Doc Chat’s insurance-specific capabilities here: Doc Chat for Insurance.
What gets extracted for Property, Marine, and GL sanctions checks
Doc Chat’s entity extraction is tuned to insurance submissions and claim packets. Common elements include:
- Legal entities: named insureds, additional insureds, parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, joint ventures, DBAs, and beneficial owners at or above your configured threshold (commonly 25 percent).
- People: officers, directors, principals, signatories, claim payees, vendor owners.
- Marine specifics: vessel names and aliases, IMO numbers, flag states, technical and commercial managers, charterers, port agents.
- Claims and vendors: salvage companies, adjusters, restoration vendors, towing and storage firms, law firms, TPAs, and medical providers (for GL bodily injury claims).
- Financial counterparties: mortgagees, loss payees, lienholders, banks.
- Locations and jurisdictions: addresses, countries of incorporation, places of performance, port calls.
By unifying all of these into a single canonical list, Doc Chat eliminates the need to re-key names into screening portals and ensures every party introduced anywhere in the file is captured for compliance review.
Applying the OFAC 50 Percent Rule and ownership checks
Ownership screening is often the hardest part for risk managers. The 50 Percent Rule can convert a seemingly clean counterparty into a prohibited one based on combined ownership by sanctioned persons. Doc Chat assists by:
- Extracting declared ownership stakes from broker questionnaires, beneficial ownership forms, org charts, and corporate filings embedded in submissions.
- Checking owners and their co-owners against sanctions lists and computing combined effective ownership.
- Flagging gaps where ownership details are missing or ambiguous, and prompting a request-for-information letter or broker follow-up.
- Producing a clear, date-stamped worksheet showing ownership logic, assumptions, and list versions for later audit.
When integrated to external registries or commercial corporate data, Doc Chat can enrich declared ownership with additional signals, further reducing the risk of missed indirect control.
Underwriting, mid-term, and claims use cases for sanctions screening
Sanctions risk touches multiple moments in the policy and claim lifecycle. Doc Chat supports a consistent approach across all of them:
Pre-bind underwriting screening
When a Property or GL submission arrives, Doc Chat extracts every named and additional insured, vendor, and financial party. For marine, it captures vessels, IMOs, flag states, and counterparties. It screens the entire set and generates an evidence package for the binder, with page-level citations back to ACORD forms, SOVs, schedules, and attachments.
Mid-term adds and endorsements
When endorsements introduce new named insureds, subcontractors, or marine counterparties, Doc Chat automatically re-runs screening on the incremental changes. It highlights what is new, what is unchanged, and what needs manual escalation.
Renewals and portfolio sweeps
Doc Chat can batch-screen expiring policies with updated SOVs, new vessel lists, or refreshed vendor rosters. Risk managers regain control of large books by running regular sweeps without delaying renewal cycles.
Claims pre-payment checks
Before issuing claim payments, Doc Chat extracts payees, restoration vendors, salvors, towing firms, experts, and law firms from the claim file and settlement agreements and screens them. For marine cargo or hull losses, it also checks counterparties involved in salvage or transshipment. This step reduces the likelihood of blocked payments and banking complications.
Example: end-to-end workflow for a GL construction account
Consider a large construction GL risk with a general contractor and a rotating list of subs. The broker submits ACORD 125 and 126, SOVs for equipment, a subcontractor schedule, and COIs. With Doc Chat:
- All legal names, DBAs, and subcontractors are extracted, deduplicated, and normalized, with addresses and jurisdictions.
- The list is screened against OFAC SDN/SSI, BIS, EU, UN, and HM Treasury sources via your chosen data connectors.
- Near-matches are presented with confidence scores, alias notes, and links to source list entries, while exact matches are flagged for immediate escalation.
- A defensible evidence package, including page citations back to ACORD forms and the subcontractor schedule, is filed in the system of record.
- As new subcontractors are added mid-term, Doc Chat automatically screens the additions and updates the audit log.
What about marine cargo and hull?
Marine adds additional complexity. Doc Chat captures vessel names and IMOs from broker packs, charters, or endorsements; normalizes variant vessel naming; and checks flag states and managers. It identifies port agents and freight forwarders referenced in emails or attachments and screens them. The risk manager can ask questions in natural language: show any vessel on this schedule with port calls in embargoed jurisdictions over the last year; list counterparties with ownership links to sanctioned parties; or summarize where ownership data is incomplete.
Explainability and audit readiness by design
Insurance compliance demands traceability. Doc Chat creates a transparent audit trail for every action:
- Page-level citations: Every extracted name and vessel links back to the exact page where it was found across ACORD apps, SOVs, schedules, or email attachments.
- List versions and timestamps: Screening results show the source watchlist and version at the time of screening, plus who reviewed or approved escalations.
- Configurable decision rules: Your thresholds, lists, and escalation criteria are captured as presets so they can be reviewed and updated centrally.
- Evidence packages: For each submission or payment, Doc Chat produces standardized summaries and screening logs ready for compliance and legal review.
These features align with lessons shared in Nomad’s thought leadership on enterprise-grade insurance AI, including the need for page-linked evidence and consistent outputs. For background on why inferring insights across unstructured documents is fundamentally different from simple field scraping, see Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs.
From manual bottlenecks to always-on screening
Manual sanctions screening looks like a document bottleneck because it is one. Risk managers are stuck re-reading files to find one more name, retracing steps across web portals, and rebuilding proof folders before audits. Doc Chat removes the bottleneck by centralizing extraction and screening and enabling instant follow-up questions. When new documents arrive, the system re-checks what changed and updates the log without rerunning the entire process from scratch.
To understand how removing document bottlenecks transforms speed and quality in regulated workflows, see Nomad’s piece on medical records and complex claims, which generalizes to any high-volume document environment: The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks.
Integration patterns that fit your environment
Risk managers do not need a core system overhaul to adopt Doc Chat. Start small and scale:
- Drag-and-drop pilot: Upload real submission and claim packets; test extraction and screening on your own cases; validate accuracy with your compliance team.
- API integration: Connect to intake portals and document repositories so new submissions and endorsements trigger automated screening flows.
- System of record sync: Push structured results, screening logs, and evidence packages to your underwriting workbench, policy admin, claims system, or GRC platform.
- Portfolio orchestration: Schedule batch screenings for renewals, vendor panels, or vessel schedules; export results to dashboards for risk aggregation and oversight.
Most customers move from pilot to production in 1–2 weeks with Nomad’s white glove implementation team. As adoption grows, we help standardize presets across Property & Homeowners, Specialty & Marine, and GL teams, ensuring consistent output and training.
Measuring success: KPIs for sanctions automation
Risk managers and compliance leaders typically track:
- Turnaround time: Median time from submission receipt to completed sanction screen.
- Coverage of screening: Percent of counterparties screened per file and across the portfolio, including mid-term changes and claim payees.
- Accuracy: Reduction in false negatives and in unnecessary escalations from false positives.
- Audit readiness: Percent of files with complete evidence packages and page-level citations.
- Cost and capacity: Files processed per FTE and overall operational expense trends.
In our experience, teams see near-immediate cycle-time reductions and step-function increases in coverage and auditability once Doc Chat is in production. For broader context on the economics of document automation and data entry across industries, read AI's Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry.
Human in the loop: calibrated confidence, not black boxes
Automation works best when it augments expert judgment. Doc Chat treats risk managers as decision-makers, not bystanders. Confidence-scored candidate matches are easy to accept, reject, or escalate. Presets enforce consistent handling rules, but teams can override with rationale captured for audit. This aligns with best practices Nomad advocates across claims and underwriting AI: keep humans in the loop, insist on source-linked answers, and train teams to understand capabilities and limits. See Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation for a discussion of this operating model.
Common pitfalls Doc Chat helps you avoid
Sanctions screening is harder than it looks. Doc Chat mitigates the most common failure modes:
- Alias and transliteration blind spots: Captures and normalizes diacritics, spacing variants, and transliterations for non-Latin scripts.
- Partial entity names and DBAs: Reconciles DBAs and trade names with legal entities and supports cross-document context to catch variant references.
- Ownership opacity: Extracts ownership details wherever they appear and flags gaps requiring RFI follow-up; computes combined ownership for OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule.
- Incomplete scope: Ensures all counterparties appear on the screening list, including mortgagees, loss payees, salvors, vendors, and counsel.
- Stale evidence: Time-stamps list versions and screening decisions; makes re-screening easy when lists update or new facts arrive.
Security, privacy, and regulatory alignment
Nomad Data is built for regulated industries. We maintain rigorous security controls aligned with SOC 2 Type 2 practices. Doc Chat supports data residency, role-based access, and encrypted storage and transit. We work with your compliance and IT teams to align on model usage, PHI/PII handling in claims, and list-source governance. Outputs are explainable and defensible, with consistent application of your rules and standards across portfolios and teams.
Getting started: turn your sanction workflow into a strategic advantage
Risk managers do not need a big-bang project to see benefits. Most teams follow a pragmatic path:
- Identify the initial use case: for example, pre-bind Property submission screening or marine vessel schedule checks.
- Pilot on real files: run side-by-side with your current method; compare speed, accuracy, coverage, and auditability.
- Codify playbooks: capture your escalation thresholds, list priorities, and 50 Percent Rule interpretations as Doc Chat presets.
- Roll out in waves: extend to mid-term endorsements, renewal sweeps, and claims pre-payment checks.
- Scale portfolio-level analytics: use structured outputs for dashboards highlighting concentrations, exceptions, and process SLAs.
As a result, sanctions compliance shifts from a manual drag on underwriting and claims to a fast, consistent, auditable capability that protects the enterprise and strengthens customer experience.
Key takeaways for Property, Specialty & Marine, and GL Risk Managers
If you are searching for ways to run an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance portfolios or to automate OFAC/sanction review for commercial submissions, Doc Chat offers the fastest path to results. It is tuned for the documents, regulations, and workflows you already use and is delivered with white glove service and a 1–2 week implementation timeline. With Doc Chat, your team screens more entities with fewer errors, defends decisions with better evidence, and spends more time on judgment calls instead of copy-paste work.
Ready to see it on your own submissions and claim files? Learn more and request a walkthrough at Doc Chat for Insurance.