Part of our complete guide to negative news screening for Swiss banks. This post is the deep dive on OpenSanctions vs LSEG World-Check as sanctions data sources; the guide covers the end-to-end picture.
Picking between OpenSanctions and LSEG's World-Check One is a procurement decision that shapes operations for years. Switching later is rough, public information about the comparison is sparse, and most of what does exist is written by one of the two vendors.
This post is a buyer's-side framing: what each provider publishes about itself, where the differences actually live, and what the regulator expects you to verify yourself before signing a contract.
What each provider says about itself
The numbers below come from each vendor's own published documentation. Treat them as starting points for your due diligence, not as decision inputs on their own.
OpenSanctions publishes:
- 320+ data sources aggregated into named collections (the Default collection bundles ~325 sources). Source list and per-source documentation is public. (Source)
- Refresh cadence: the Default collection is rebuilt every 6 hours. The hosted SaaS API checks for new data every ~30 minutes; self-hosted Yente checks hourly by default. The "all sources" superset moved to monthly refresh in February 2025. (Source)
- Data model: FollowTheMoney (FtM), a graph schema with statement-based provenance, where each attribute traces back to the originating source and time range.
- Licensing: data is published under CC BY-NC 4.0, which means free for non-commercial use only. Commercial use requires a paid license: either a bulk/on-prem subscription or the SaaS API at €0.10 per successful call (with volume tiers above 20,000 requests/month). (Source)
- Yente is the open-source self-hosted matching API (repository). FastAPI plus ElasticSearch or OpenSearch, ships as Docker containers, supports the OpenRefine Reconciliation API.
LSEG World-Check (the post-LSEG-acquisition successor to Refinitiv World-Check) publishes:
- Coverage of 240+ countries and territories, 300+ sanctions programmes, and content drawn from 900+ sanction, regulatory and law-enforcement lists. Marketing material cites 50,000+ new records added monthly. (Source)
- Deployment: SaaS web portal (World-Check One) and a REST/JSON API with Swagger 2.0 spec; v3 current, v2 supported. (Developer portal)
- Pricing: published online tiers for new customers (Tier 1 up to 3,000 screens, Tier 2 up to 5,556 screens, points-based), with enterprise pricing by sales quote. (Source)
- Refresh cadence: not publicly disclosed at a per-list SLA level. Marketing references continuous research; the contractual commitment is what your procurement should ask about explicitly.
The asymmetry in transparency is itself useful information: OpenSanctions publishes its source list, refresh schedule, and pricing. LSEG publishes coverage claims and entry-level tiers but reserves operational specifics to contracts under NDA.
What each provider does not tell you in marketing
Both providers have publicly documented operational events worth knowing about going in.
LSEG World-Check has had two notable public incidents:
- 2017 Maajid Nawaz settlement. Thomson Reuters (then the owner) reached an undisclosed settlement and removed an incorrect "terrorism" classification from his profile. (Wikipedia summary)
- April 2024 GhostR breach. A subset of World-Check data (approximately 5.3 million records per TechCrunch reporting) was exfiltrated through a Singapore-based third-party customer (not LSEG directly) and surfaced on a hacker forum.
Neither event invalidates the product, but both inform questions your procurement should ask: how are individual designations verified before inclusion, what does the third-party access governance look like, what indemnities are in your contract.
OpenSanctions is open-source-led and most of its operational issues surface on its GitHub. Indexing behaviour, hardware requirements, and edge-case alias handling are discussed publicly in issues and FAQ pages. Refreshing for due diligence, but it does mean the operational maturity story is "read the issues yourself" rather than "ask your account manager".
What independent analysts cover
The major analyst firms cover screening solutions, not sanctions data sources specifically.
- Forrester Wave: Anti-Money-Laundering Solutions, Q2 2025 evaluates 15 AML platform vendors across 18 criteria including sanctions screening; Leaders are SAS, DataVisor, NICE Actimize and SymphonyAI. (Forrester)
- Chartis RiskTech100 2026 ranks compliance-tech vendors broadly rather than head-to-heading sanctions data feeds. (Chartis)
There is no public analyst report we are aware of that puts OpenSanctions and LSEG World-Check head-to-head as data sources. If you are evaluating them, you are doing primary research either way.
What the regulators actually require you to verify
Two regulatory anchors matter for how Swiss financial intermediaries should think about this choice:
- FATF Recommendations 6 and 7 (targeted financial sanctions for terrorism, R.6, and proliferation, R.7) require freezing of designated funds without delay. (R.6 best-practices PDF) Whichever provider you use, the institution carries the obligation, not the vendor.
- AMLO-FINMA Art. 22: documentation must allow a knowledgeable third party to reconstruct individual decisions. (Fedlex) The provider's match output is part of that documentation. Whether your vendor's match metadata can survive a five-year audit is something to verify before signing. The full picture of what Swiss examiners look for is in our breakdown of AML evidence requirements.
The FCA's Financial Crime Guide on sanctions systems and controls (updated November 2024) is the most operational regulator-published benchmark we know of. Its expectations apply equally well in Switzerland: firms should have documented SLAs for how quickly designated lists are reflected in their screening, understand how their tool calibrates matches, and test thresholds.
A practical evaluation framework
Five things worth verifying directly during procurement, regardless of which provider you lean toward:
- Source-list provenance and update SLA. Ask for the per-source refresh latency in contractual terms. "Continuous research" in marketing should resolve to a concrete number on paper.
- PEP scope and methodology. Both providers cover PEPs; the coverage boundary (sub-national officials, family members, time horizon for former PEPs) varies. Get specifics before you assume parity.
- Match metadata fidelity. Run a sample of representative client names through both providers' matching engines and look at what metadata each one returns. Reconstruction of a screening decision is only possible if the metadata still tells you, years later, why a match fired.
- Licensing constraints. Particularly relevant for SaaS reselling, multi-tenant deployments, or downstream data warehouses. Read the licence as if a regulator were asking you to share data with a successor entity.
- Operational evidence. Run an audit drill against each provider's evaluation environment using the same fictional cases. Vendors that cannot support a drill during procurement are a yellow flag.
"Show me a screening that was performed three years ago, and walk me through how the data provider's response at that moment differs from what they would return today." This is the kind of question your procurement evaluation should anticipate. Both providers can answer it; the operational work to prove you can answer it is yours, not theirs.
Where each one tends to fit
Generalising from how the market actually deploys these:
- OpenSanctions tends to fit institutions that value source transparency, want to self-host, are happy to invest engineering time in operating Yente, and have screening volumes where the €0.10/call API or a bulk subscription is materially cheaper than enterprise alternatives. Smaller Swiss FIs and FinTechs serving predominantly European retail customers are a common cohort.
- LSEG World-Check tends to fit institutions with broader jurisdictional exposure (notably significant Latin American or African client books), more demanding PEP-coverage requirements, procurement cycles that prefer enterprise contracts to pay-as-you-go, and screening volumes where enterprise pricing becomes favourable.
These are tendencies, not rules. Mid-tier Swiss banks running into AML team capacity sometimes use both: OpenSanctions as the primary engine for false-positive control, World-Check as a secondary check on flagged-only investigations. NNSFlow integrates both with configurable routing rules for exactly that pattern.
What to take into the procurement meeting
If you are evaluating now, three questions to ask each vendor that the public marketing material does not answer:
- What is your contractual SLA on the time between an authority publishing a designation and that designation appearing in our screening results?
- What metadata fields are guaranteed stable across major version upgrades, and what is your deprecation policy?
- In the event that we change providers in three years, what data are we permitted to retain for our own audit purposes, and in what format?
The answers tell you more about which provider will actually fit your operations than any feature list.
