MUNICH, Germany, 6 August 2026 - Adjuvanto spoke with 68 trade compliance practitioners across chemicals, energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, aerospace, packaging, logistics, technology and other sectors to understand how sanctions screening works in practice. One pattern appeared repeatedly: much of the work starts after the screening system flags a potential match.

Screening software is designed to compare customers, suppliers and other business partners against sanctions lists quickly. But compliance professionals still need to confirm whether it is the same entity, understand which sanctions list is involved, decide whether any restriction affects the business and document the decision.

False positives still consume expert time

At one energy company, around 1,200 individual screenings resulted in approximately 150 false positives per screening cycle. With each false positive taking around 20 minutes to resolve, this represented roughly 50 hours of manual review per cycle.

At a telecommunications company, two people work full-time on clearing false positives. At a global manufacturer, around 2,000 to 2,500 purchase orders were blocked each month and required manual review. First-level reviews took around five minutes, while cases escalated to trade compliance could take up to an hour.

At a chemicals company, simple false positives took at least 30 minutes to resolve. Complex cases could take days and sometimes required external legal advice.

Tuning helps. Better data, matching and system settings can reduce false positives. But even when the number of alerts falls, the cases that remain still need to be investigated and documented.

After the match, the browser tabs start

One experienced trade compliance practitioner described using several search engines (Google, Yandex, Baidu), their professional network and a personal list of 30-40 public company registries to investigate unclear matches.

At an aerospace distributor, a typical investigation took one to two hours per business partner. The team checked websites, official company records, addresses and online maps. At a packaging company, sanctions findings were manually checked again against official public sources. Relevant pages were saved as screenshots and uploaded into the internal system as evidence.

This is where due diligence actually happens. Checking a registry entry, confirming an address on a map, reading recent press coverage, looking at who a company trades with and where: these are the steps that turn a match into a defensible decision, and they are the same steps that surface circumvention risk. The problem is that they happen outside the compliance system, by hand, and the quality depends on how much time the analyst has that day. One head of compliance in the maritime sector described the effect on her team simply: "It's a waste of cognitive load."

Ownership, directors, geography: what a score cannot see

The research also showed why difficult cases cannot be solved by a match score alone. Teams may need to check location, legal entity details, ownership, directors, business activities and what a particular sanctions restriction means for the planned transaction.

Different alphabets add another layer. One practitioner at a technology research organisation described manually comparing English and Chinese names and researching ownership structures to identify the correct entity.

A high name-match score can point to a possible risk. It cannot answer the final business question: are we allowed to do business with this party?

Compliance professionals are open to AI, but want control

Appetite for automation was high. The condition was consistent: the reasoning has to remain visible.

Asked about automatically clearing matches below her review threshold, one senior trade compliance practitioner in the chemicals sector said: “If it’s not more than 80% I don’t want to see it.” A compliance leader in the cosmetics sector described a preferred model of roughly 90% AI-driven screening with 10% final human review.

Others were more cautious. Concerns focused on accuracy, responsibility and whether the reasoning behind a recommendation could be checked. A repeated message was that automation should reduce repetitive work without hiding the evidence or taking control away from the compliance professional.

“What convinced us to build wasn’t just what practitioners told us, but the frustration we could feel in those conversations. Existing tools simply haven’t kept pace with the speed and complexity of change in sanctions and export controls,” said Konrad Preuninger, CEO and co-founder of Adjuvanto. “Compliance professionals are leaving their screening tools to finish the job. They are jumping between search engines, company registries, maps and official sources to reach and document a single decision. The opportunity is to use technology to perform that browser work on one platform, at scale and globally.”

The next opportunity is resolution

The research also included companies with highly mature screening setups. At one large industrial company, the false-positive rate had been reduced from 7% to 2%, yet significant review work remained. The team wanted “something that runs over the top of screening” that could recognise patterns such as “we’ve seen this party before”.

That is an important distinction. The problem is not always poor screening. The gap can come after screening, where the actual due diligence happens: bringing together the right information, deciding consistently across cases and analysts, and keeping a clear record of why. A group legal counsel for trade compliance at a global telecommunications company described a tool for this stage as something that "ticks a box that is not there right now."

These findings helped shape Adjuvanto's focus on the investigation and decision stage of sanctions screening.

About the research

The findings are based on conversations with 68 trade compliance practitioners. The research was qualitative and should not be read as a representative statistical survey. Interviewee and employer names have been removed; examples are identified only by industry.

About Adjuvanto

Adjuvanto is a Munich-based trade compliance technology company. It builds a sanctions screening and resolution platform that supports the full workflow: screening business partners against sanctions lists, investigating potential matches, and documenting the decision. While most screening tools stop at the match, Adjuvanto focuses on the investigation and decision stage, where compliance teams spend most of their manual effort. The company works with European exporters and manufacturers. More at www.adjuvanto.com