New York Forum on Economic Sanctions

As global regulatory frameworks continue to diverge amid shifting geopolitical tensions, evolving trade policies, and changing enforcement priorities, organizations face growing complexity in maintaining consistent compliance. This session will explore:

• Managing uncertainty in a fragmented regulatory environment: Responding to diverging sanctions, trade, and enforcement expectations across jurisdictions
• Strengthening escalation and governance frameworks: Improving decision-making, accountability, and risk oversight in complex compliance environments
• Building defensible compliance programs: Enhancing documentation practices to demonstrate effective compliance to regulators and enforcement agencies
• Creating compliance agility: Adapting policies, controls, and operating models to keep pace with rapidly evolving regulatory and geopolitical developments

As regulatory frameworks increasingly intersect, organizations must move beyond siloed compliance models and build integrated approaches across sanctions, export controls, AML, and CFT. This session explores how to operationalize convergence in practice through aligned risk assessments, governance, and controls to manage overlapping obligations while improving efficiency, consistency, and defensibility.

• From silos to integration: Designing unified frameworks that align sanctions, export controls, AML, and CFT risk management
• Harmonizing risk assessment methodologies: Integrating typologies, data sources, and monitoring to capture cross-regime exposure
• Control optimization and efficiency: Reducing duplication while strengthening end-to-end compliance across overlapping regulatory requirements
• Governance and accountability in a converged environment: Redefining ownership, escalation, and oversight to ensure clarity and defensibility

As digital assets become more widely adopted, sanctions compliance challenges are growing in complexity. This session will explore emerging sanctions evasion typologies, the use of blockchain analytics to identify illicit activity, and practical strategies for strengthening compliance programs.

Panelists will also discuss the implications of the GENIUS Act and how organizations can prepare for evolving regulatory expectations in the digital asset space.

• Enforcement updates: Recent enforcement actions and lessons from sanctions-related investigations involving digital assets
• Leveraging blockchain to detect illicit finance: Advances in on-chain monitoring, transaction tracing, wallet screening, and risk-scoring technologies
• Building effective compliance controls for crypto and digital assets: Governance, customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, and third-party risk management considerations
• Preparing for the GENIUS Act and the next phase of regulatory expectations: Practical steps organizations should take now to align policies, controls, and risk assessments with future regulatory requirements

AI is moving from experimentation to tangible impact in sanctions of compliance. This session highlights real-world success stories, showing how firms are scaling AI-driven solutions to enhance risk detection, streamline operations, and deliver measurable improvements in effectiveness, efficiency, and defensibility.

• From pilot to production: Scaling AI use cases across screening, monitoring, and investigations to deliver enterprise-wide impact
• Precision and performance gains: Leveraging AI to reduce false positives, improve alert quality, and enhance risk detection accuracy
• Operational transformation: Integrating AI into compliance workflows to increase efficiency, consistency, and investigator productivity
• Governance and model risk management: Ensuring transparency, explainability, and regulatory defensibility in AI-enabled sanctions programs

As sanctions programs grow more complex and enforcement activity intensifies, sophisticated actors increasingly rely on shadow banking channels, opaque maritime networks, shell companies, and third-party intermediaries to evade restrictions. This session will examine how organizations can identify hidden sanctions risks, uncover indirect exposure to sanctioned parties, and strengthen controls to detect emerging evasion typologies across global trade and financial networks.

• Following the money trail: Uncovering sanctions evasion networks operating through shadow banking channels, shell companies, transshipment hubs, and complex ownership structures
• Spotting maritime red flags: Identifying AIS manipulation, vessel spoofing, ship-to-ship transfers, and other deceptive shipping practices used to circumvent sanctions
• Looking beyond direct counterparties: Detecting sanctions exposure through distributors, agents, resellers, freight forwarders, and other third-party intermediaries
• Connecting the dots: Leveraging beneficial ownership analysis, trade data, network mapping, and enhanced due diligence to uncover hidden sanctions risks

Effective sanctions compliance depends on the quality, accuracy, and accessibility of underlying data. Incomplete customer records, inconsistent data sources, poor entity resolution, and fragmented systems can undermine screening, delay investigations, and create significant compliance risk. This session will explore practical strategies for improving data integrity to enhance sanctions screening, monitoring, risk assessments, and investigative outcomes.

• Data quality as a compliance imperative: Identifying gaps that undermine screening effectiveness, monitoring capabilities, and sanctions risk detection
• Building a trusted data foundation: Strengthening governance, entity resolution, and beneficial ownership transparency across compliance systems
• Connecting fragmented data sources: Integrating customer, transaction, and third-party information to create a comprehensive view of sanctions risk
• Driving better compliance outcomes: Leveraging data analytics to reduce false positives, improve alert quality, and enhance investigative effectiveness