Developer runs 1,400 sanctions screening tests to settle fuzzy vs. exact match debate

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A developer building an onboarding flow for a fintech client tested a sanctions screening API to resolve an internal disagreement over the right match threshold for OFAC compliance checks. Querying the common Russian name 'Sergei Ivanov' at a 0.7 threshold returned 101 total matches across OFAC, UN, and EU sanctions lists, including one perfect exact match and dozens of fuzzy hits. Among the fuzzy results was a terrorist organization flagged at 0.85 similarity simply because its name shared two starting letters with the query. The experiment revealed that while fuzzy logic successfully catches transliteration variants of sanctioned names, it also generates significant noise through phonetic and token collisions. The findings led the team to conclude that neither a strict 0.95 threshold nor a loose 0.65 threshold was appropriate, and that the shape and type of matches matter as much as their volume.

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