Streamlining Sanction and OFAC Review from Submission Packages — Built for the Compliance Analyst in Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction

Sanctions screening has become a mission‑critical control that directly influences underwriting decisions, claims handling, and carrier reputation. Yet for most Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction carriers, compliance analysts still sift manually through messy submission packages to find every named insured, DBA, subsidiary, vessel, owner, and key counterparty to run against OFAC and other sanction lists. The result? Slow cycle times, inconsistent diligence, and unacceptable regulatory risk.

Nomad Data’s Doc Chat changes this. Doc Chat is a suite of purpose‑built, AI‑powered agents that reads entire submission packages at once, extracts all relevant people and entities (including variants and transliterations), and automatically prepares an audit‑ready screening roster you can cross‑check against OFAC, UK HMT, EU, UN, BIS, and other watchlists. With Doc Chat for Insurance, a task that used to take hours per file is condensed to minutes—with citations back to source pages for defensibility.

Why Sanction Diligence Is a Bottleneck Across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction

For a Compliance Analyst supporting underwriters in these lines, the documentation is sprawling and the counterparty landscape is complex. Each line has unique nuances that make sanctions diligence both essential and inherently difficult:

• Property & Homeowners: Commercial property submissions often arrive as long broker emails with attachments including ACORD 125/126/140 applications, Schedules of Values (SOV), named insured schedules, property manager rosters, lender/loss payee schedules, and certificates of insurance. Entities may be layered (ParentCo → PropHoldings LLC → Building SPVs), with DBAs and historic names mixed across PDFs and spreadsheets. Compliance analysts must surface all affiliated entities and beneficial owners to comply with OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule.
• Specialty Lines & Marine: Marine and cargo risks require entity and asset screening—vessels, IMOs, flags, registered owners, operators, charterers, and last ports of call. Sanctions programs change frequently (e.g., Russia, Iran, DPRK, Syria) and can impact shipping routes, trading partners, and even marine service providers. A missed vessel alias or mis‑transliterated owner name can lead to severe penalties or blocked property obligations.
• General Liability & Construction: GL and construction packages include contractor applications, subcontractor rosters, additional insured schedules, vendor lists, master service agreements, and jobsite manifests. Risk extends through supply chains and subs. Underwriters and compliance must ensure no named party (or its hidden owners) is on a sanctions list, and that work doesn’t occur in embargoed jurisdictions or with restricted counterparties.

In all three lines, the challenge is the same: submissions are heterogeneous and unstructured. Critical counterparty names and relationships are scattered across broker submissions, policyholder info packets, entity lists, org charts, SOVs, vessel schedules, and correspondence. The sheer volume of documents and the variability in how names appear (aliases, DBAs, former names, translations) overwhelm manual processes.

The Manual Process Today: Time‑Consuming, Error‑Prone, and Hard to Audit

Most carriers still rely on a manual diligence workflow that looks like this:

Step‑by‑step reality for a Compliance Analyst

• Open the broker submission email and attachments (often 20–50 documents): ACORD 125/126/140, SOVs, loss runs, org charts, vessel schedules, subcontractor lists, service provider rosters, and property manager lists.
• Skim each document to compile a spreadsheet of names: named insureds, DBAs, parent companies, subsidiaries, UBOs, officers/directors, subcontractors, key vendors, lenders, certificate holders, loss payees, and—on marine files—vessels, owners, operators, charterers, and managers.
• Normalize and deduplicate: account for punctuation differences, spacing, abbreviations (Co vs. Company), translations and transliterations, and frequent misspellings.
• Manually check each unique name against OFAC’s SDN List and other relevant watchlists (UK HMT, EU CFSP, UN, BIS Entity List, State Department, Trade.gov Consolidated Screening List). Capture exact hits and potential matches.
• Investigate potential matches: search for addresses, FEINs, D‑U‑N‑S numbers, registration jurisdictions, and prior names; validate UBOs for OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule; on Marine, validate IMO numbers, current/previous vessel names, flags, and ownership histories.
• Document outcomes: paste screenshots or copy results into a tracking spreadsheet; write notes that tie each decision back to a page number or file name; save everything to the underwriting file for audit.
• Re‑run screening if anything changes (new docs arrive, risk locations update, vessels swap, subs are added) and keep the log synchronized with the policy record.

Even for experienced analysts, this can take 45–120+ minutes per submission. It is exhausting during peak renewal seasons or when catastrophe events spike submissions. And because the process depends on sustained attention, it’s easy to miss a name variant, a hidden subsidiary, or a vessel alias—the very places sanctions risk often hides.

What’s at Stake: The Compliance and Business Risk of Getting It Wrong

Sanctions programs carry strict liability and severe penalties. The core risks to insurers include:

• Regulatory enforcement and fines: Processing a policy or claim involving an SDN or designated vessel can trigger hefty penalties and reputational damage.
• Blocked property obligations: Failure to identify a sanctions nexus may require you to block payments, hold funds in interest‑bearing accounts, and file reports—disrupting customer relationships and operations.
• OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule: Even if a named insured is not listed, ownership by one or more SDNs totaling 50% can trigger sanctions exposure. This demands precise UBO capture across documents.
• Evolving maritime advisories: On Specialty Lines & Marine, the dynamic nature of vessels, flags, and ownership chains increases exposure. An alias or past owner reference buried in a vessel schedule can be the difference between a clean file and a violation.
• Audit and exam findings: Inconsistent documentation of screening outcomes—especially decisions on near‑matches—invites remediation expense and potential consent orders.

In short, manual diligence struggles to match the volume, speed, and complexity of modern submissions. You need a way to make an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance as reliable and auditable as your best analyst on their best day—at any scale.

AI Compliance Check Against OFAC Insurance: Turning Submissions Into Structured, Screen‑Ready Rosters in Minutes

Doc Chat by Nomad Data ingests entire submission packages—emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and images—and in minutes produces a complete, deduplicated roster of entities and individuals ready for sanction screening. It doesn’t just extract text; it reads like a domain expert, making inferences across inconsistent formats to capture DBAs, historic names, affiliated entities, and vessel metadata with page‑level citations for every finding.

Ask Doc Chat questions like:

• “List all named insureds, DBAs, parent companies, and subsidiaries across this broker submission, ACORD 125/126/140, and SOV packets. Include addresses, FEINs, and known aliases, and cite the source pages.”
• “Extract directors, officers, and any owners noted on corporate filings or org charts. Group beneficial owners by percentage for OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule analysis.”
• “For the marine schedule, list each vessel with IMO number, current and prior names, flag, registered owner, commercial operator, manager, and last three ports of call if present.”
• “Create a CSV of every counterparty in subcontractor rosters and additional insured schedules and note which engagement or project they belong to.”

From there, Doc Chat aligns names, normalizes variants, and delivers a single, audit‑ready screening list for your watchlist engine. You can export to CSV/JSON, pass to your screening provider via API, or run it through your internal screening tools. Every item is traceable to the exact page where it was found.

How to Automate OFAC/Sanction Review Commercial Submissions With Doc Chat

The fastest path to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions is to put Doc Chat at the top of the intake pipeline:

• Ingest: Drag‑and‑drop broker submissions, ACORD applications, SOVs, org charts, vessel schedules, subcontractor lists, and correspondence—or connect email inboxes, SFTP, or intake portals.
• Extract & Normalize: Doc Chat identifies all parties, aliases, and relationships; cleans and deduplicates; and prepares a canonical roster.
• Screen: Export to your sanctions screening system or leverage Doc Chat’s API to call external screening services against OFAC, UK HMT, EU, UN, BIS, and other lists.
• Resolve: Address tentative matches quickly using Doc Chat’s page‑level citations. Ask targeted questions (“Where did this alias appear?”) and receive answers within seconds.
• Archive & Audit: Save the structured roster, screening results, and citations back to the underwriting file. Produce exam‑ready reports on demand.

What Doc Chat Actually Does on Your Files

Unlike generic OCR or keyword tools, Doc Chat is configured on your playbooks and your documents so it recognizes how your organization names, stores, and evaluates counterparties across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction. Under the hood, Doc Chat delivers:

• Whole‑file ingestion at scale: Process thousands of pages across a single submission package—broker submissions, policyholder info packets, entity lists, ACORD 125/126/140, SOVs, org charts, marine vessel schedules, subcontractor rosters, and lender/loss payee schedules—without adding headcount.
• Entity extraction + resolution: Identify named insureds, DBAs, former names, parent/subsidiary relationships, UBOs, officers and directors; on marine files, capture vessel name history, IMO numbers, flags, owners, operators, and managers.
• Name normalization and transliteration: Standardize variations, handle punctuation and spacing differences, and map transliterations to increase hit rates and reduce false negatives in subsequent screening.
• Ownership checks for OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule: Aggregate noted percentages across owners; flag potential indirect control or multiple SDN owners whose stakes may combine to reach 50%.
• Jurisdiction and routing context: Surface sanctioned and high‑risk geographies cited in documents, including trading routes or ports in marine submissions and project locations in construction.
• Real‑time Q&A: Ask “Have we captured every entity that needs screening?” or “Show me the document pages where charterers are named,” and get linked answers instantly.
• Audit‑ready outputs: Export structured rosters with citations, create a repeatable audit trail, and standardize the narrative for near‑match decisions.

For a deeper dive on why extraction at this level of sophistication requires AI that can infer and connect concepts across documents (not just read fields), see Nomad’s perspective: Beyond Extraction: Why Document Scraping Isn’t Just Web Scraping for PDFs.

Examples From the Field: A Marine Package and a Construction GL Submission

Specialty Lines & Marine: A broker submits a 60‑page package: vessel schedule, charter party, certificates, and a PDF with owner/operator details. Doc Chat ingests the packet, extracts each vessel with IMO number, current and former names, flag, registered owner, commercial operator, and technical manager—plus any addresses and contact details. It also pulls charterers named in the charter party and lists prior ship names referenced in attachments. The output roster is deduplicated, mapped to canonical names, and linked to document citations. The Compliance Analyst exports this to screening and resolves two near‑matches in minutes using Doc Chat’s links back to the exact pages and context.

General Liability & Construction: A national contractor submission includes ACORD apps, master services agreements, a 3,000‑row subcontractor list (XLSX), and additional insured schedules across several projects. Doc Chat standardizes entities across the spreadsheet and PDFs, maps DBAs to parent companies, and highlights addresses that place a handful of subs in high‑risk jurisdictions. It produces a tidy screening roster with project associations, enabling targeted checks and faster “clean file” sign‑off. Subsequent monthly vendor updates are processed in seconds with consistent outputs and a full audit trail.

Business Impact for Compliance Analysts and Underwriting Teams

Placing Doc Chat at the front of the sanction diligence process creates measurable value:

• Time savings: Typical manual extraction and preparation of a screening roster often takes 45–120+ minutes per submission. Doc Chat reduces this to 2–10 minutes, even for large or complex files. If your team processes 1,500 submissions per month at 60 minutes each, that’s ~1,500 hours. Automating 80% saves ~1,200 hours monthly—equivalent to 7–9 FTE weeks.
• Cost reduction: Less overtime during peak seasons, fewer external reviews on complex marine files, and streamlined second‑line QA. Teams can reallocate time to high‑value investigations rather than rote list building.
• Accuracy improvements: Entity resolution, alias detection, and page‑level citations reduce false negatives while providing defensible documentation for near‑match dispositions. Consistency rises as the AI enforces your playbooks on every file.
• Scalability: Surge volumes (renewals, cat events, large broker migrations) no longer require proportional staffing increases. Doc Chat scales to thousands of pages per minute across many concurrent submissions.
• Auditability: Every decision is backed by the source page. Produce exam‑ready packages in minutes with clear rationale and standardized documentation.

Great American Insurance Group’s experience with Nomad illustrates the gains possible when teams stop scrolling and start asking precise questions. See how complex claims document review moved from days to minutes—with page‑level citations to preserve trust—here: Reimagining Insurance Claims Management.

Why Nomad Data’s Doc Chat Is the Best Fit for Sanctions Diligence in Insurance

Doc Chat was designed for insurance documents from day one. That matters when your submission packages are a mix of ACORDs, SOVs, vessel schedules, org charts, and broker narratives.

• Volume: Ingest whole submission files—thousands of pages across PDFs, spreadsheets, images—without adding headcount. Reviews move from days to minutes.
• Complexity: Sanctions risks hide in affiliates, footnotes, vessel aliases, and DBA lines. Doc Chat unearths exclusions, endorsements, and trigger language inside dense, inconsistent documents to avoid blind spots.
• The Nomad Process: We train Doc Chat on your playbooks, documents, and standards, producing a personalized solution aligned to Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction workflows.
• Real‑Time Q&A: Ask “Have we captured each beneficial owner noted in the org chart?” or “Which pages list vessel prior names?” and get instant answers, with citations.
• Thorough & Complete: Doc Chat surfaces every reference to coverage, liability, damages—and for compliance, every counterparty to be screened—so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Your Partner in AI: Nomad delivers a white‑glove service and evolves with your needs—more than software, a strategic partner for lasting impact.

For the bigger picture on how Doc Chat transforms rote document work into machine‑driven intelligence, explore: AI’s Untapped Goldmine: Automating Data Entry and The End of Medical File Review Bottlenecks.

Fast, White‑Glove Implementation: Live in 1–2 Weeks

Doc Chat implementations are deliberately lightweight and collaborative. Typical timeline to production is 1–2 weeks:

• Discovery (days 1–2): Nomad reviews your submission samples across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction; we collect your compliance playbooks (e.g., entity thresholds, lists to screen, match‑resolution SOP).
• Configuration (days 2–6): We build “presets” for roster extraction (e.g., Named Insured/DBA/Parent/Sub/UBO, Marine Vessel/Owner/Operator), set normalization rules, and map outputs to your screening system format.
• Validation (days 5–9): Run real submissions you’ve already worked to compare outcomes; calibrate match thresholds and naming conventions; finalize the audit templates.
• Go‑Live (days 7–14): Enable drag‑and‑drop use for analysts; optionally integrate API hand‑offs to your screening provider; deliver training and change‑management sessions.

Security and governance are built in—Nomad is SOC 2 Type 2 certified, provides document‑level traceability, and can be deployed with SSO and role‑based access controls. For more on implementation pragmatics and adoption, see Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation.

Integration and Workflow Options

Doc Chat meets you where you work:

• Intake: Drag‑and‑drop portal, secure inbox ingestion, SFTP, API uploads.
• Outputs: CSV/JSON rosters, PDF audit packs with citations, direct API to your screening engine, or push to policy administration/CRM systems.
• Feedback Loop: Analysts resolve near‑matches and Doc Chat captures the rationale in a standardized format to improve consistency and institutionalize expertise.
• Monitoring: Re‑screen on schedule or on change (new documents received, vessel swap, subcontractor list updates) and auto‑append changes to the audit log.

Governance, Auditability, and Model Risk Management

Sanctions diligence demands more than speed. It demands defensibility. Doc Chat supports:

• Page‑level citations for each extracted entity, name variant, and ownership detail.
• Explainable workflows with preserved prompts, presets, and configuration history.
• Role‑based access, SSO integration, event logging, and retention policies aligned to your compliance requirements.
• Data privacy: Your documents remain your data; customer data is not used to train foundation models by default. See our security practices referenced in AI’s Untapped Goldmine.

Because Doc Chat standardizes outputs and preserves the reasoning trail, it reduces variance between analysts and shortens the time to respond to internal audits or regulatory exams. It also mitigates knowledge loss when staff rotate or depart—a core problem highlighted in our perspective on institutionalizing expertise.

Checklist: Getting Started for Compliance Analysts

Use this quick plan to operationalize an AI compliance check against OFAC insurance within two weeks:

• Assemble 15–25 representative submissions across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction (include complex marine and multi‑entity property files).
• Provide your current screening SOP: lists to check, match‑resolution criteria, and audit templates.
• Define output targets: columns/fields needed by your watchlist tool (e.g., Name, Type, FEIN/D‑U‑N‑S, Address/City/Country, Role, % Ownership, IMO, Flag, Project/Portfolio).
• Run a side‑by‑side POC: Doc Chat produces rosters; compare to your team’s outputs; calibrate naming and thresholds.
• Enable live use: drag‑and‑drop ingestion for analysts; optional API to your screening provider for one‑click checks.
• Codify near‑match notes: standardize narratives for audit, and embed them as presets in Doc Chat.

How Doc Chat Strengthens the Compliance Analyst’s Role

Doc Chat doesn’t replace compliance expertise—it amplifies it. By taking over the rote reading, row building, and name wrangling, Doc Chat lets Compliance Analysts focus on judgment—triaging genuine matches, advising underwriting on risk appetite exceptions, and shaping portfolio‑level policies on high‑risk jurisdictions or trades. Teams become more strategic, reduce burnout, and improve retention by shedding drudge work. For broader context on freeing experts to do higher‑value work, see AI for Insurance: Real‑World AI Use Cases.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Doc Chat run the sanctions screening itself?
Doc Chat prepares a complete, normalized roster and can push that list to your screening system via API. Many clients prefer this pattern because it preserves existing controls and reporting while eliminating the time‑intensive entity extraction step.

What lists can we screen against?
Most insurers screen OFAC SDN/SSI, UK HMT, EU CFSP, UN, BIS Entity List, and Trade.gov CSL at a minimum. Marine clients also reference advisories pertaining to Russia, Iran, DPRK, and Syria. Doc Chat produces the fields your screening engine needs to maximize match quality.

How does Doc Chat handle vessel metadata?
It extracts vessel names, prior names, IMO numbers, flags, registered owners, operators, managers, and related parties wherever present in the documents. It also maps aliases and transliterations to support better screening downstream.

What about OFAC’s 50 Percent Rule?
Doc Chat aggregates ownership percentages mentioned across documents and flags combined stakes that may meet or exceed 50% by SDNs. Analysts still make the final call, but the data collection and math are automated.

How is accuracy ensured?
Every extracted item links back to its source page. Analysts can verify in a click, which both speeds review and satisfies audit requirements. The solution is configured to your playbooks, so outputs follow your internal standards.

From Weeks to Minutes: The Operating Model Shift

Traditional sanctions diligence assumed that reading everything was unavoidable. With Doc Chat, the model flips: the machine reads and structures everything in minutes; humans then ask targeted questions and make the final sanctions determination. This mirrors the pattern our carrier clients see in other document‑heavy functions—summarize first, investigate second—documented in our client stories and webinars. Tasks that took days are now measured in minutes, with quality and consistency improving in lockstep.

If you want to see how this speed and accuracy plays out in other high‑volume, high‑complexity insurance workflows, explore: GAIG + Nomad Webinar and Reimagining Claims Processing Through AI Transformation.

Your Next Step

If your organization is ready to automate OFAC/sanction review commercial submissions across Property & Homeowners, Specialty Lines & Marine, and General Liability & Construction, the fastest way to prove value is to run Doc Chat on a handful of live submissions that your Compliance Analysts already know well. In under a week, you’ll see the roster outputs, confirm accuracy against your gold standards, and quantify the time savings.

Learn more or schedule a working session here: Doc Chat for Insurance. Within 1–2 weeks, you can be live with audit‑ready, AI‑driven sanction diligence that keeps your underwriting moving and your organization compliant.