Streamlining Sanction and OFAC Review from Submission Packages for Underwriters — Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, General Liability & Construction

Underwriters have never faced more pressure to evaluate complex submissions at speed while protecting the company from regulatory risk. Every market submission carries potential exposure if one missed name, vessel, or affiliate appears on an OFAC Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list or another denied party registry. The challenge: submission packages are sprawling, inconsistent, and full of names and entities hidden across attachments, endorsements, schedules, and correspondence. This is exactly where Nomad Data’s Doc Chat steps in.

Doc Chat by Nomad Data is a suite of purpose‑built, AI‑powered agents that read entire submission packages end to end, extract people and entities, normalize and de‑duplicate them, and instantly cross‑check against sanctions and denied party lists. Instead of hours of manual review, underwriters can ask targeted questions like: ‘List all named insureds, additional insureds, and beneficial owners found in this submission’ or ‘Identify any entities that are potential matches to current OFAC/EU/UK lists.’ For teams seeking an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance that works at underwriting speed and scale, Doc Chat delivers a defensible, auditable process in minutes. Learn more at Doc Chat for Insurance.

The underwriting reality: why sanctions screening is hard in Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction

While compliance teams own policy and governance, underwriters are often the first and last line of defense at quote, bind, and renewal. Across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction, the nuance lies in where sanctioned parties and red flags can hide:

Property & Homeowners

Submission packages typically include ACORD 125, ACORD 140, statements of values (SOVs), loss run reports, location schedules, and lists of additional insureds. Sanction exposure can reside in:

Mortgagees, property managers, loss payees, and landlords embedded in schedules.
Parent companies, subsidiaries, and affiliates referenced in emails or endorsement requests.
Real estate holding companies or shell entities with opaque beneficial ownership.

Underwriters must verify whether every entity tied to the property interest, from the named insured to the property manager, is clear of OFAC lists and other denied party databases. The more locations, the more names, and the higher the risk of a miss.

Specialty Lines & Marine

Marine and specialty submissions bring additional complexity. Broker submissions may span charter party agreements, bills of lading, cargo manifests, vessel schedules, and policy endorsements. Critical checks include:

Vessel screening by name and IMO number, historical names, and flag state.
Charterers, owners, managers, and disponent owners that differ from beneficial owners.
Ports and routes that touch embargoed regions (e.g., Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and certain regions of Ukraine).

OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule and maritime advisories mean underwriters must trace ownership layers and ensure no sanctioned persons collectively control an entity, even if not explicitly listed. In practice, these relationships seldom live in one file; they are scattered across attachments, emails, and prior-year placements.

General Liability & Construction

GL and construction underwriting packages often include ACORD 125/126, contractor questionnaires, OSHA logs, safety manuals, project owner contracts, and schedules of subcontractors and vendors. Sanction risk can come from:

Subcontractor and vendor master files, updated by the broker mid-negotiation.
Certificates of insurance (COIs) listing additional insureds and waiver holders.
Joint ventures and special purpose entities that change across project phases.

The volume of names balloons when reviewing multi-tier subcontractor lists, geographically dispersed projects, and joint venture structures. One omission can lead to a regulatory event and reputational harm.

How the process is handled manually today

Even at best-in-class carriers, sanctions review at the underwriting desk is still highly manual, repetitive, and error-prone:

Collect the submission package from email, portals, or broker data rooms, often including ACORD forms, SOV spreadsheets, entity lists, organizational charts, loss runs, policyholder info, and contract exhibits.
Read each document line-by-line to identify named insureds, DBAs, additional insureds, affiliates, parent companies, beneficial owners, mortgagees, and other interested parties. In marine, also extract vessel names, IMO numbers, managers, owners, and charterers.
Compile a working list in a spreadsheet, trying to normalize naming variations and de-duplicate entries. For example, mapping ‘ABC Holdings LLC’ to ‘ABC Holdings, L.L.C.’ and recognizing that ‘ABC Group’ is a parent to ‘ABC Logistics Ltd.’
Check external lists by hand or via a portal: OFAC SDN, OFAC non-SDN lists, BIS Entity List, EU Consolidated List, UK HMT Consolidated List, UN sanctions, and other restricted/denied party sources or vendor screening tools.
Document the checks with screenshots, notes, and timestamps for audit; re-run checks at bind and renewal; and preserve evidence in the underwriting file.
Follow up with the broker for missing entity details, W‑9/W‑8BEN‑E, beneficial ownership certifications, corporate registries, or IMO identifiers.

This approach is slow and brittle. Names are missed, spelling variants slip through, and evidence capture is inconsistent across desks. Seasonal volume spikes force overtime or push quotes out, creating adverse selection. When underwriters try to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions using generic tools, they quickly hit the limits of keyword search and rigid templates.

Where manual sanctions review breaks down

In our work with underwriting and compliance teams, we repeatedly see the same failure modes in manual sanctions screening:

Missed entities: People and organizations hide in footers, email signatures, endorsements, PDFs inside PDFs, and image-only scans.
Ambiguous matching: Without robust normalization and context, John Smith vs. Jon Smith vs. J. H. Smith produce too many false positives or missed matches.
Ownership tracing: The OFAC 50 Percent Rule demands that underwriters connect the dots across layers of ownership that are rarely contained in a single document.
Marine complexity: Vessels change names and managers; IMO numbers remain stable but are often omitted in the submission; routing data and port calls require extra diligence.
Audit gaps: Screenshots and notes vary by underwriter; reproduction for regulators or internal audit becomes difficult months later.
Scale and speed: When hundreds of submissions arrive before a program renewal, turnaround suffers and compliance risk rises.

Put simply, traditional processes are no match for the volume, complexity, and urgency of modern underwriting—especially when every missed entity can trigger a significant regulatory event.

How Nomad Data’s Doc Chat automates sanctions and OFAC review end-to-end

Doc Chat is built to handle the documents and nuances of underwriting screening. It ingests entire submission packages—PDFs, scanned images, Excel SOVs, Word documents, zip archives, and email threads—and performs entity discovery, normalization, and auditing in one workflow. Here is how it works:

1) Full-file ingestion

Doc Chat reads the entire submission package at once, not one document at a time. It can process thousands of pages and attachments in minutes, including embedded files and images. This eliminates blind spots caused by scattered files and inconsistent layouts. As detailed in our client experience with Great American Insurance Group, massive files can be interrogated in seconds with page-level citations; see this GAIG case study.

2) Entity extraction and consolidation

The system extracts all people and organizations across the package, including named insureds, subsidiaries, parents, DBAs, additional insureds, mortgagees, property managers, loss payees, vendors, subcontractors, joint ventures, charterers, vessel owners/managers, and beneficial owners referenced in policyholder info and broker submissions. It also pulls vessel identifiers (e.g., IMO number) and common commercial identifiers (e.g., EIN, D‑U‑N‑S, LEI) when present.

3) Normalization and de-duplication

Doc Chat recognizes variations in spelling and structure, mapping ‘ABC Holdings LLC’ to ‘ABC Holdings, L.L.C.’ It builds a single, authoritative entity table with supporting evidence links back to the source pages. Underwriters can ask plain-language questions such as: ‘Show all entities that appear only once in the file’ or ‘Which entities are referenced in the SOV but not on ACORD 125?’

4) List screening and 50 Percent Rule assistance

Doc Chat integrates with your existing sanctions tools and data sources, including OFAC SDN and non‑SDN lists, BIS Entity List, the EU and UK consolidated lists, and UN lists, or your preferred denied/restricted party vendor. The AI performs candidate matching with confidence scoring and evidence citations, highlighting potential hits and near-miss variants. For OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule, it compiles known ownership relationships extracted from the file, surfaces gaps that require broker RFI, and maintains a checklist for completion.

5) Marine-specific checks

For Specialty & Marine, Doc Chat captures vessel names, historic names, IMO numbers, managers, and owners, and compiles them into a screening table. It flags records without IMO numbers, suggests broker follow-ups, and supports checks against maritime advisories. When routes or ports are listed, Doc Chat highlights potential exposures to embargoed regions and encourages verification.

6) Real-time Q&A and decision support

Beyond automated extraction, underwriters can interrogate the submission in natural language: ‘List every additional insured and the contracts where they appear’ or ‘Are any entities with addresses in sanctioned jurisdictions?’ The system answers instantly and links back to the exact source pages for verification. If you have been searching for an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance that adapts to each submission’s idiosyncrasies, this is it.

7) Evidence capture and audit trail

Every match, non-match, and decision is timestamped with citations to source documents and list sources. Doc Chat produces an auditable report suitable for internal audit, compliance review, and regulatory scrutiny. This brings discipline and uniformity across desks and regions, addressing a major cause of compliance drift.

8) Continuous monitoring and renewal reuse

Doc Chat stores the normalized entity table for renewal reuse and periodic rechecks. When a sanction list updates, re-screening can run automatically, and any changes appear as incremental deltas for the underwriter to review, accelerating renewals and program rollups.

Use cases by line of business

Property & Homeowners

Doc Chat reads ACORD 125/140, SOVs, mortgagee schedules, property management agreements, and loss run reports. It assembles a clean table of named insureds, mortgagees, property managers, and loss payees, checks them against sanctions lists, and produces an audit-ready log. If an entity is listed only in an email attachment or a footnote, Doc Chat still finds it.

Specialty Lines & Marine

Doc Chat consolidates vessel data, charter party agreements, bills of lading, voyage schedules, and owner/manager structures pulled from broker submissions. It pairs vessel names with IMO numbers where present, highlights missing IDs, and organizes owners, disponent owners, managers, and charterers for screening. It also tracks route or port references to support geographic risk checks.

General Liability & Construction

Doc Chat processes ACORD 125/126, contractor questionnaires, subcontractor schedules, vendor master lists, COIs, and project owner contracts. It compiles subcontractors and vendors tier by tier, normalizes naming inconsistencies, and screens every listed entity. It flags JVs and SPVs unique to certain projects and keeps a reusable roster for renewal and project addendums.

How underwriters are doing it better with Doc Chat today

Underwriters can keep their familiar workflows while offloading the drudgery to AI. A typical day looks like this:

Drag-and-drop the submission package into Doc Chat or route it automatically via your intake queue.
Within minutes, review a normalized entity list with source citations and preliminary screening results.
Ask targeted questions to resolve ambiguities: ‘Which entities may be near-matches on SDN with medium confidence?’ ‘Which entities require beneficial ownership clarification?’
Kick off a broker RFI with a single click, using Doc Chat’s templated request that references the missing elements.
Finalize the sanctions review with an exportable, audit-ready report and proceed confidently to pricing and terms.

This is Document Intelligence that goes far beyond basic extraction. As we explain in Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs, Doc Chat is designed to infer, standardize, and reason across messy, real-world submissions—the way top-performing underwriters do.

Make sanctions checks part of underwriting muscle memory: embed an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance

The best sanctions process is the one that happens every time without friction. With Doc Chat, underwriting teams embed an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance into the core of their triage and clearance steps. The agent runs silently in the background, prompting underwriters when it needs human judgment and documenting every outcome. No extra portals. No screen-scraping. No duplicate work.

Because Doc Chat is trained on your playbooks and document types, it applies your definitions of ‘complete submission’ and your specific screening boundaries. Whether your rules say ‘screen at quote and bind’ or ‘screen at quote, bind, midterm endorsements, and renewal,’ Doc Chat executes consistently and produces the same quality of evidence across desks.

How to automate OFAC/sanction review for commercial submissions without changing your systems

Carriers often ask: can we automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions without replatforming? Yes. Doc Chat integrates with your existing intake channels and sanctions providers. Start with a drag-and-drop pilot, then connect to your underwriting workbench or document management system via API. Many teams begin with zero IT lift, then graduate to a fully automated pipeline within 1–2 weeks.

Typical integration patterns

Inbound email/portal feed routes submissions to Doc Chat for immediate screening and entity extraction.
Doc Chat calls your sanctions vendor API or reads your local screening results, reconciling hits with the extracted entity table.
Results and the audit bundle post back to the underwriting workbench, creating a consistent, reviewable record.

This approach lines up with the pragmatic lessons we share in Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation: deliver immediate value with minimal disruption, prove accuracy with side-by-side comparisons, and then scale confidently.

Business impact: speed, cost, accuracy, and audit defensibility

Sanctions screening is a perfect example of high-volume, high-stakes document work where AI delivers outsize returns. The benefits compound across underwriting teams and lines of business:

Time savings

Underwriters and assistants often spend 30–90 minutes per submission assembling names, verifying identifiers, and checking lists. Doc Chat compresses this to minutes—even on multi-thousand-page packages—so your teams can quote faster, reduce backlogs, and win more desirable risks. As documented in multiple client stories, Doc Chat turns days of document review into minutes; see The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks.

Cost reduction

By automating repetitive screening tasks, you reduce overtime, external vendor reliance for manual lift, and rework caused by inconsistent process adherence. Teams redeploy capacity toward risk selection and pricing instead of document hunting.

Accuracy improvements

Doc Chat never tires and reads page 1,500 with the same attention as page 1. It surfaces every reference to a party or vessel, normalizes spelling, and prevents key terms from slipping through. It also delivers consistent capture of citations and decision evidence, reducing variability across desks and geographies.

Auditability and compliance

Every check, interpretation, and disposition is logged with timestamps and links to the source pages. Whether you are responding to internal audit, regulators, or reinsurers, you can reproduce the sanctions workflow and decisions with confidence. As we note in AI's Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry, structuring unstructured work is the unlock for both efficiency and defensibility.

Why Nomad Data is the best partner for underwriting sanctions automation

Doc Chat is not a generic summarizer. It is a suite of purpose-built document agents for insurance, trained to your underwriting playbooks, documents, and standards. Key differentiators include:

Volume without added headcount: Doc Chat ingests entire submission packages (including thousands of pages) and delivers results in minutes.
Complexity handling: From endorsements to vessel ownership chains, Doc Chat finds exclusions, endorsements, 50 Percent Rule issues, and scattered entity references that humans routinely miss.
Real-time Q&A: Ask Doc Chat to ‘List all entities with non-US addresses’ or ‘Show every vessel name and any IMO number we have’ and get immediate answers with citations.
The Nomad Process: We customize Doc Chat to your rules, documents, and workflows so it fits like a glove—no generic one-size-fits-all approaches.
White-glove service and 1–2 week implementation: Start in days. We partner closely with underwriting and compliance to map your steps, validate accuracy, and go live quickly.

With Doc Chat, you gain more than software—you gain a partner committed to evolving your underwriting and compliance workflows over time. Explore capabilities at Doc Chat for Insurance.

What documents and forms does Doc Chat handle for sanctions screening?

Doc Chat is designed around the real artifacts underwriters use every day across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction. Common inputs include:

Broker submissions and market presentations
ACORD 125/126/140, supplemental questionnaires
Policyholder info, entity lists, org charts
Statements of values (SOVs) and location schedules
Loss run reports and prior policy documentation
Mortgagee, loss payee, additional insured schedules
COIs, vendor and subcontractor rosters
Charter party agreements, bills of lading, voyage schedules
Vessel names and IMO identifiers referenced in emails and attachments
W‑9, W‑8BEN‑E, beneficial ownership certifications
Sanctions affidavits and attestation forms

Doc Chat processes all of the above in a single run, then allows you to ask follow-up questions until you are satisfied that screening is thorough and compliant.

Governance, security, and defensibility

Sanctions screening touches sensitive data. Nomad Data maintains robust controls and auditability designed for insurers. Our approach prioritizes:

Security posture: Enterprise-grade security and governance workflows.
Explainability: Page-level citations tie every extracted entity and screening decision back to source documents.
Separation of duties: Underwriters stay in control. AI produces evidence and recommendations; humans make determinations.
Vendor neutrality: Use your existing sanctions data or providers. Doc Chat orchestrates and documents the end-to-end process.

For a broader perspective on how enterprise-grade AI changes document-heavy work, see AI for Insurance: Real-World AI Use Cases.

From pilot to scale: how teams get started

We recommend a two-phase approach that mirrors how leading carriers adopt AI for claims and underwriting:

Phase 1: Side-by-side accuracy validation

Underwriters and compliance analysts select representative submission packages across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and GL & Construction. Doc Chat runs extraction and screening alongside the current process. Teams verify the entity table, review potential hits with citations, and validate the audit report against internal standards. This is a fast way to build trust, as discussed in our GAIG spotlight: Reimagining Insurance Claims Management: GAIG.

Phase 2: Embedded workflow and automation

Doc Chat integrates into your underwriting workbench and sanctions provider. Submissions route automatically to Doc Chat, which returns normalized entity tables, screening results, and audit bundles. Underwriters review, ask follow-up questions, and finalize decisions faster and more consistently.

Frequently asked questions for underwriting teams

Does Doc Chat replace our sanctions vendor?

No. Doc Chat orchestrates and documents the screening process, extracts and normalizes entities, and then leverages your existing list sources or vendor APIs. It makes your current screening technology far more effective by ensuring the candidate list is complete and well-structured.

What about the OFAC 50 Percent Rule?

Doc Chat extracts ownership references from submissions, compiles a relationship map, and highlights gaps requiring broker clarification. It does not make legal determinations; it equips your team with the evidence and prompts needed to make sound, defensible decisions.

Can we tailor Doc Chat to our playbook?

Yes. The Nomad Process trains Doc Chat on your documents and standards. We codify your screening cadence, evidence requirements, and exception routing, then enforce them consistently across desks and geographies.

How quickly can we go live?

Most teams start hands-on in days and reach embedded workflows within 1–2 weeks. Our white-glove team does the heavy lifting so underwriters can see value immediately.

A day in the life: underwriting a construction schedule with hundreds of subcontractors

A GL & Construction underwriter receives a submission with ACORD forms, contractor questionnaires, OSHA logs, and a 4,000-line subcontractor schedule in Excel. Historically, this would take hours of copy/paste and spot checks. With Doc Chat, the underwriter drops the entire package into the agent, which:

Extracts every subcontractor and vendor, normalizes naming variants, and de-duplicates.
Flags possible matches against OFAC and other lists with confidence scores and citations.
Identifies a gap: a joint venture SPV listed in a contract exhibit but missing from the entity roster—triggers an automated broker RFI.
Outputs an audit-ready bundle showing what was checked, when, and where each name came from in the submission.

Result: the underwriter moves from document wrangling to judgment calls in under 10 minutes, with confidence that the sanctions check is thorough and defensible.

A day in the life: a marine submission with complex vessel and owner structures

A Specialty & Marine underwriter receives a market presentation with charter party details, bills of lading excerpts, and scattered references to vessel names and managers. Doc Chat:

Extracts vessel names and any IMO numbers, pairing them when possible and highlighting missing identifiers.
Compiles owners, disponent owners, managers, and charterers from across emails and attachments.
Screens each party and vessel record against your list sources and provides page citations for every match or non-match.
Surfaces route and port references that may trigger geographic exposure checks and suggests follow-up questions.

What previously took a specialist hours now becomes a streamlined, auditable step in the quote workflow.

Why the old way is becoming untenable

Underwriting teams cannot scale manual sanctions screening to match growing submission complexity and volume. Turnaround expectations are shrinking while risks and regulatory scrutiny grow. As we write in Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation, consistent accuracy across thousands of pages is where AI shines and humans fatigue. The same principle applies to underwriting sanctions checks: computers never tire, and they never forget to capture a screenshot for audit.

From reduction of leakage to better portfolio insights

While the immediate win is regulatory compliance, the second-order effects are strategic. Sanctions screening acts as a quality gate on the entity data that populates your underwriting systems. Once Doc Chat normalizes and centralizes entities across submissions, your portfolio analytics improve: cleaner named insured hierarchies, fewer duplicates, and clearer affiliate relationships. This helps with portfolio risk analysis and supports reinsurance conversations with clean, verifiable data.

The bigger picture: document intelligence as a force multiplier

Sanctions screening is one of many underwriting and claims workflows ripe for automation. By standardizing extraction, normalization, and Q&A across document types, Doc Chat frees experts to do expert work. For a deeper look at end-to-end transformation and why automation is no longer optional, see AI for Insurance: Real-World AI Use Cases. The same capabilities that accelerate claim summaries and fraud detection also power underwriting checks that once seemed too nuanced to automate.

Take the first step

If you are evaluating ways to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions without disrupting underwriting, Doc Chat offers the shortest path from pilot to production. Start with a handful of representative packages, validate accuracy and audit outputs side-by-side, and then integrate into your intake and sanctions vendor flows. Within weeks, sanctions screening stops being a bottleneck and becomes a reliable, invisible part of your underwriting muscle memory.

See how Doc Chat can fit your underwriting workflows at Doc Chat for Insurance. When compliance and speed both matter, you should not have to choose.