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Alerts and Notifications in Monitoring Portal

How the Monitoring Portal detects changes and delivers alerts to your team

The Monitoring Portal continuously re-screens all monitored entries against the latest sanctions and watchlist data. Whenever a monitored entry changes status, the portal automatically generates an alert so your team can review and take action without any manual re-checks.

What Triggers an Alert

An alert is generated each time a watchlist update affects a monitored entry. This can happen for several reasons, including:

  • Detection of a new potential match → a monitored entry is identified as a possible match against a sanctions list, PEP list, or other watchlist.
  • Updates to an existing sanctions record → changes to a listed entity's record, such as the addition of a new alias, date of birth, address, or other identifying information.

Each new alert is initially assigned a status of New. From there, your team can review the match details and classify it as a False Positive or Real Positive directly in the portal.

 

Alert Frequency

Alerts are generated as soon as watchlist updates are processed. sanctions.io refreshes its dataset every 60 minutes, so in most cases, your team can expect to be notified shortly after a relevant change appears on a covered list.

This refresh cadence applies to all data sources covered by sanctions.io, including:

  • Global sanctions lists (e.g., OFAC SDN, UN Consolidated List, EU, OFSI, and others)
  • Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) lists
  • Other watchlists and adverse media sources covered by sanctions.io

For more information on available sanctions lists and watchlists, see Covered Sanctions and Watchlists.

 

Notification Channels

Alerts are delivered through three channels. You can use one or all of them depending on your team's workflow:

Channel How It Works Default Status
Monitoring Portal Dashboard New alerts appear under the New column in the Monitoring Portal. All users in your organization with access to the portal can see them. Enabled
On by default
Email Notifications Alert emails are sent to the registered email address of the user who added the entry to the Monitoring Portal. To keep the initial dataset onboarding simple, email alerts are disabled by default to avoid inbox noise, and can be enabled at any time by contacting help@sanctions.io. Disabled
Off by default
API / Webhooks Real-time event notifications are delivered directly to your system when a webhook integration is configured. See Webhooks in sanctions.io → Monitoring Events for setup instructions. Optional Requires setup

Tip: For time-sensitive compliance workflows, we recommend configuring webhook notifications in addition to the dashboard. Webhooks allow your systems to react instantly to alert events without relying on manual portal checks.

 

Managing Alerts in the Portal

Once an alert appears in the portal, your team can open the match detail page to review the confidence score, source list, and relevant metadata. Each alert can then be classified as:

  • New Match → Default status when a potential match is first detected. Can be reclassified after review.
  • False Positive → The match is not relevant; future alerts for this result will be suppressed.
  • Real Positive → The match is valid and may require escalation or further investigation.

Any status change or comment update is saved automatically and refreshes the Last Action timestamp, maintaining a complete and auditable compliance trail.

For step-by-step instructions on reviewing and classifying alerts, see Viewing and Auditing Alerts in the Monitoring Portal guide.

 

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If you have any questions or need more help, please contact our support team anytime!