Streamlining Sanction and OFAC Review from Submission Packages for Underwriters

Sanctions compliance has become a mission-critical step in underwriting. Whether you’re quoting a tower of coverage for a commercial property schedule, reviewing a marine risk with multiple vessels and beneficial owners, or vetting subcontractor rosters for a complex construction project, the obligation is the same: ensure no insured, additional insured, certificate holder, vendor, vessel, or ultimate beneficial owner appears on the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) lists or other global sanctions lists. The problem is that these names and entities are buried across sprawling submission packages—ACORD forms, Statements of Values, loss runs, charterparties, SOV spreadsheets, organizational charts, and email attachments—making manual review slow, inconsistent, and risky.

Nomad Data’s Doc Chat solves this problem at the source. Built for insurance documents and workflows, Doc Chat automates end-to-end extraction of names, entities, vessels, addresses, and ownership information from broker submissions and related underwriting documents, then cross-checks them against OFAC and other sanctions lists instantly. If you’re searching for an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance or looking to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions, Doc Chat provides a fast, auditable, and highly accurate path from ingestion to decision—so your underwriting teams can quote faster while reducing regulatory exposure.

Why sanctions screening is uniquely hard for underwriters across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction

Underwriters face line-of-business-specific complexities that make sanctions screening more than a simple names-and-matches exercise:

Property & Homeowners

Submission packages arrive with ACORD 125/126/140, Statements of Values (SOVs) listing thousands of locations, property management agreements, lender requirements, and loss run reports. Named insureds and additional insureds may include owners, LLCs, REITs, property managers, and HOAs. Names are often abbreviated, addresses inconsistent, and ownership layered through holding companies—raising OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule questions on aggregated ownership by sanctioned parties. Screening must capture: property entities, management companies, lenders, mortgage servicers, and sometimes individual board officers or trustees referenced in attachments or emails.

Specialty Lines & Marine

Marine submissions add maritime-specific complexity: vessel names, IMO numbers, flag states, owners, operators, bareboat or time charterers, and ports of call. OFAC has issued shipping advisories on deceptive practices (e.g., AIS manipulation, ship-to-ship transfers) that heighten diligence. Underwriters need to identify vessels and entities in charterparties, bills of lading, P&I documentation, and registers—then screen against OFAC’s SDN list, the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications (SSI) list, and other global lists. Vessels and owners may appear under transliterated or legacy names; the screening must be fuzzy, multilingual, and citation-backed.

General Liability & Construction

GL and construction underwriters evaluate prime contractors, joint ventures, project owners, and extensive subcontractor lists. Submissions can include vendor rosters, certificates of insurance (COIs), W-9s, organizational charts, and major supplier lists. Screening must capture every entity with a financial or contractual nexus to the project, including JVs formed just for the job. The complexity multiplies with long Excel lists, multiple domains and DBAs, and beneficial ownership declarations. Any ownership stake by a sanctioned party—even indirect—can trigger OFAC restrictions.

How the process is handled manually today

Today, many underwriting teams manage sanctions screening with a patchwork of manual steps that slow down quote cycles and introduce risk:

• Opening ACORD applications, SOVs, loss run reports, vendor lists, and email attachments one by one, copying names into a separate screening tool or spreadsheet.
• Normalizing names by hand (e.g., stripping punctuation, handling initials, mapping DBAs to legal names) and attempting fuzzy searches for transliterations and alternative spellings.
• Cross-checking OFAC SDN and SSI lists, plus UK HMT, EU consolidated, UN consolidated, and (when relevant) BIS Entity List—often in separate portals.
• Backtracking through submissions to verify where each name came from, then saving screenshots for audit, without consistent page-level citations.
• Attempting to apply OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule manually from corporate org charts, UBO statements, and public records, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
• Re-screening at bind or renewal by repeating the same steps from scratch.

This approach creates bottlenecks and exposure. It delays quoting, consumes underwriter time that should be spent evaluating risk and pricing, and makes it easy to miss names buried in footers, exhibits, and email signatures. Most importantly, it creates inconsistent, non-standardized evidence of screening that may not withstand regulatory scrutiny after a payment or placement.

How Nomad Data’s Doc Chat automates OFAC and sanctions review from submission packages

Doc Chat by Nomad Data ingests the entire submission—email chains, PDFs, scanned images, Excel SOVs, ACORD 125/126/140, charterparties, vendor rosters, COIs, W-9s, UBO declarations, and organizational charts—and does the heavy lifting. The system is trained on insurance workflows and tuned to underwriting use cases in Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction. It automates:

Entity extraction and normalization

Doc Chat reads every page and sheet, extracting and normalizing:

• Named insureds, additional insureds, certificate holders, producers, property managers, HOAs, lenders, trustees, and beneficiaries.
• Marine vessels and IMO numbers, owners, operators, charterers, managers, and ports.
• Construction primes, JVs, project owners, and subcontractor/vendor rosters with addresses and FEINs when present.
• DBAs, legacy names, non-Latin characters (Cyrillic, Arabic), and transliterations, using fuzzy matching and language-aware normalization.

Automated sanctions cross-checking

Once entities are extracted, Doc Chat cross-checks them against OFAC SDN/SSI and other global lists. Screening can be performed via your preferred screening vendor API or standards-based lists; Doc Chat simply orchestrates and records the process with page-level citations, so every match (or non-match) is traceable back to the source line in the submission. For marine, Doc Chat can prioritize vessel and owner checks and apply additional maritime advisories logic.

OFAC 50 Percent Rule inference support

Doc Chat structures beneficial ownership from org charts, LLC agreements, and UBO attestations, then aggregates percentages to highlight potential 50 Percent Rule concerns. It flags gaps (e.g., missing UBO disclosure for a JV member) and generates a task list for the broker, standardizing follow-ups and eliminating back-and-forth emails.

Real-time Q&A across massive document sets

Underwriters can ask targeted questions and receive instant answers with citations:

• “List all named insureds, additional insureds, property managers, and HOAs with country of domicile.”
• “Highlight every vessel and IMO number, then screen each against OFAC SDN/SSI; show any fuzzy matches ≥ 85% confidence.”
• “From the subcontractor roster, extract legal names, DBAs, and addresses, and identify any entities with ownership ties to sanctioned jurisdictions.”

Every answer links to the exact page, row, or cell, providing a defensible audit trail for underwriting and compliance.

Standardized evidence and audits

Doc Chat produces a standardized sanctions screening packet—entities screened, results, list versions and timestamps, and page-level citations—that can be attached to the underwriting file and retained for audits. If you re-run screening at bind or renewal, Doc Chat generates a delta view to show what changed.

The document types Doc Chat handles for sanctions screening

Doc Chat’s strength is breadth and depth across insurance documents. For underwriters in Property & Homeowners, Specialty & Marine, and GL & Construction, that includes:

• ACORD forms (e.g., ACORD 125, 126, 127, 140), supplemental questionnaires, and broker submissions including cover emails.
• Policyholder info, organizational charts, UBO attestations, and formation documents.
• Entity lists including vendor rosters, subcontractor lists, and certificate holder schedules.
• Marine-specific materials: charterparties, vessel registers, P&I documentation, bills of lading, and class/registry certificates with IMO numbers.
• Property-specific materials: Statement of Values (SOV) spreadsheets, appraisals, engineering reports, lender requirements, and loss run reports.
• Construction-specific materials: subcontractor agreements, certificates of insurance (COIs), W-9s, JV agreements.
• Downstream materials that benefit from the same engine: claims FNOL forms, ISO claim reports, demand letters, and medical reports—for carriers that enforce sanctions screening prior to indemnity payments.

Handling these files manually invites inconsistency. Doc Chat delivers consistent extraction at scale, turning unstructured submissions into auditable, action-ready data.

Business impact: time saved, exposure reduced, accuracy up

Replacing manual OFAC/sanctions review with Doc Chat delivers measurable benefits across underwriting desks and lines of business:

Speed and throughput

Doc Chat ingests entire submissions—including thousands of SOV rows or multi-vessel schedules—and returns a complete entity list with screening results in minutes. Teams report that what once took hours per account compresses to a few minutes, enabling same-day quoting even for complex schedules.

Accuracy and consistency

Manual fatigue leads to missed entities and inconsistent handling of DBAs and transliterations. Doc Chat maintains uniform rigor across page 1 and page 1,500, applying your underwriting playbook consistently. Page-level citations eliminate guesswork and improve internal and regulatory confidence.

Regulatory defensibility

OFAC enforcement looks for evidence of robust program controls. Doc Chat creates standardized logs and artifacts—what was screened, when, against which lists, and where the entities were sourced. This improves audit outcomes and reduces the risk of fines or post-bind remediation.

Underwriter productivity and morale

Underwriters can redirect time from tedious searches to pricing, coverage design, and broker relationships. As described in AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry, automation of repetitive extraction work doesn’t just save money—it unlocks human capacity for higher-value judgment.

“AI compliance check against OFAC insurance”: what best-in-class looks like

If you’re evaluating tools for an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance, look for the following capabilities that Doc Chat delivers out of the box:

• Entity extraction across all file types, including scanned PDFs and image-heavy submissions.
• Fuzzy, multilingual normalization (Cyrillic/Arabic transliteration, accent-insensitive matching, DBA-to-legal mapping).
• Automated cross-checks with OFAC SDN/SSI and global lists via your preferred data source or API.
• 50 Percent Rule inference support from UBO statements and org charts with transparent calculations.
• Marine-specific vessel and ownership screening using IMO numbers and contextual maritime advisories.
• Real-time Q&A with page-level citations and exportable screening packages.
• Defensible logs and versioned list references for audits.

These features separate point solutions from insurance-grade platforms. As we discuss in Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs, true value comes from replicating the inference work that experienced underwriters do—not just reading fields on a page.

“Automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions” across your lines

Doc Chat is built to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions in the exact contexts underwriters operate every day:

Property & Homeowners workflow example

A broker sends ACORD 125/140, a 4,500-line SOV, three years of loss run reports, and a management agreement naming the property manager and lender. Doc Chat:

1. Extracts all entities from ACORD forms, SOV metadata, loss runs, and the management agreement (named insured, property manager, HOA, lender, any certificate holders mentioned).
2. Normalizes names and addresses, links DBAs to legal entities, and deduplicates cross-document variants.
3. Screens extracted entities against OFAC SDN/SSI and other lists, then generates a screening log with citations to the exact pages and cells.
4. Flags missing UBO statements, creating a broker request list.
5. Produces a standardized sanctions report attached to the underwriting file; re-runs screening automatically at bind.

Specialty Lines & Marine workflow example

A marine package includes five vessels with varying owners and operators, a time charterparty, and registry certificates. Doc Chat:

1. Extracts vessel names and IMO numbers, owners, technical managers, operators, and charterers.
2. Expands synonyms/legacy names and normalizes transliterations.
3. Screens entities and vessels, applying fuzzy thresholds and maritime advisory checks; identifies a near match on an owner’s legacy name.
4. Returns an evidence pack with page-level citations and a recommended follow-up: obtain updated registry and ownership documents to confirm potential legacy-name exposure.

General Liability & Construction workflow example

A GL submission includes JV agreements, a subcontractor roster of 300 vendors, and COIs. Doc Chat:

1. Extracts JV members, project owners, primes, and all subcontractors with addresses.
2. Builds a UBO matrix from attached org charts and declarations.
3. Screens every entity and flags any ambiguous matches for review with confidence scores.
4. Highlights 50 Percent Rule aggregation risks, identifying two vendors missing UBO details and generating a templated broker request.

Implementation: fast, white-glove, and tailored to your playbook

Nomad Data’s advantage isn’t just technology. It’s the implementation model. We train Doc Chat on your underwriting playbooks, document samples, and sanctions escalation rules. Most teams are live in one to two weeks with white-glove support, minimal IT lift, and immediate value. As highlighted in our client story Reimagining Insurance Claims Management: GAIG Accelerates Complex Claims with AI, accuracy, explainability, and speed build trust quickly—especially when every answer links to the source page.

Security and governance are first-class. Nomad is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, maintains document-level traceability for every output, and integrates cleanly into existing approval and audit workflows. We routinely support teams that want to begin with drag-and-drop trials and then integrate via modern APIs into underwriting systems and document repositories—without disrupting day-to-day work. For a broader view on how this type of adoption unfolds, see Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation.

Why Nomad Data’s Doc Chat is the best solution for underwriting sanctions screening

Doc Chat isn’t a one-size-fits-all OCR tool. It’s a suite of AI agents purpose-built for insurance documentation that absorbs your processes and evolves with you. Unique strengths include:

• Scale: Ingest entire submission packages—thousands of pages and rows—without adding headcount. Reviews shift from days to minutes.
• Complexity handling: Dig out hidden entities from dense and inconsistent forms, emails, and exhibits, including obscure endorsements and footnotes.
• The Nomad Process: Train Doc Chat on your underwriting playbooks, sanctions thresholds, and escalation paths to produce a personalized system that mirrors your team’s judgment.
• Real-time Q&A: Ask questions like “List all entities needing sanctions screening” or “Show every vessel’s IMO and owner from the charterparty” and get instant, citation-backed answers.
• Thoroughness: Doc Chat surfaces every reference to coverage, entities, and ownership, eliminating blind spots and reducing leakage and compliance risk.
• Partnership: You’re not buying software; you’re gaining a partner that co-creates workflows and continually improves results.

For a deeper dive into why these capabilities matter, read The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks and AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry. Both pieces show how modern document intelligence goes far beyond generic summarization to deliver consistent, audited outputs at enterprise scale.

From underwriting to payment: close the loop on sanctions

While this article focuses on underwriting, sanctions obligations also apply at payment. Many carriers require a final check before issuing binders, paying premium taxes, placing reinsurance, or paying claims. The same Doc Chat pipelines can re-screen entities at bind or claim payment, automatically producing a timestamped log that references the exact list versions used. If your claims team wants to extend screening to FNOL forms, ISO claim reports, or demand packages, the same configuration and citation framework applies—ensuring enterprise-wide consistency.

Frequently asked questions from underwriting leaders

Can Doc Chat plug into my existing sanctions vendor?

Yes. Doc Chat can call your current screening APIs and store results alongside the extracted entities with full citations. If you prefer, Doc Chat can use standard public feeds (e.g., OFAC SDN JSON) and maintain version references.

How does Doc Chat handle fuzzy matches and transliterations?

Doc Chat uses language-aware normalization, transliteration handling (e.g., Cyrillic/Arabic to Latin), accent-insensitive matching, and confidence scoring. Ambiguous results are flagged for human review with the exact page references where the name was found.

What about the OFAC 50 Percent Rule?

Doc Chat parses UBO statements, org charts, and formation docs to structure ownership, then aggregates percentages to highlight potential 50 Percent Rule exposure. Missing or unclear disclosures are turned into a templated information request to the broker.

How fast can we implement?

Most underwriting teams go live in one to two weeks. We start with a quick playbook session, configure presets for your lines of business, and validate outputs on your real submissions. No major IT lift required to start.

Tangible outcomes for underwriters by line of business

Property & Homeowners

Turnaround for multi-property accounts shrinks from days to hours. All named insureds, additional insureds, property managers, lenders, and HOAs are found and screened with one click. SOVs with thousands of rows are parsed automatically, and any entity referenced in footnotes or exhibits is captured with page-level proof.

Specialty Lines & Marine

Vessel and owner screening becomes a routine, repeatable step. Charterparties, registry documents, and invoices are scanned for vessel references. IMO numbers anchor entity resolution, and legacy names are normalized to reduce false negatives. Advisories about deceptive shipping practices can be codified into your presets, prompting additional diligence steps when triggered.

General Liability & Construction

Underwriters receive a clean, deduplicated list of all project participants and subcontractors ready for screening. UBO gaps are flagged early, and suspicious or ambiguous matches are routed to compliance with full context and citations. Screening logs slot directly into your underwriting file and audit folders.

What makes Doc Chat different from generic OCR or RPA?

Generic OCR extracts text. Generic RPA clicks buttons. Underwriting sanctions screening requires inference across inconsistent documents, multilingual names, complex ownership, and maritime-specific identifiers—exactly the domain where Doc Chat excels. As we outline in Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs, the real prize is automating the reasoning that experts perform—not just moving data from A to B.

Getting started

The fastest path is simple: drag-and-drop a few representative submissions into Doc Chat and watch it produce an entity list, complete with sanctions screening outcomes and citations. From there, we’ll configure your presets for Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction, add your escalation rules, and integrate with your screening vendor or list sources. Within two weeks, your teams can quote faster, reduce regulatory risk, and standardize evidence across every account.

If you’re ready to see how to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions with a solution built for underwriters, explore Doc Chat for Insurance and the real-world transformations it delivers across complex insurance document workflows.