Hi everyone!
Here are this month’s highlights for upcoming changes, allowing you to adjust your integration in advance. Please take a minute to review and plan any updates.
New guide: Building a monitoring workflow
We’ve published a guide on building a counterparty monitoring workflow. It’s written for teams that need to re-screen counterparties as watchlist data changes. It looks at what to consider to minimize the workload, and how to do this using the data and screening primitives you already use. We would love to hear from you if you have any further questions.
Changes to come into effect September 15
Improved EU sanctions coverage
Effective date: 2026-09-15
If you download eu_journal_sanctions directly, or run monitoring on the eu_sanctions or sanctions collections, expect a one-time large update on September 15, 2026: several thousand entities are added to eu_journal_sanctions, and entities that also appear in eu_fsf gain a second source. Screening against eu_fsf is not affected.
From then, eu_journal_sanctions contains every designation in force under the 45 EU sanctions framework regulations, transcribed from the legal acts the Council publishes in the Official Journal of the European Union. That creates one EU source that carries the listings the Commission’s consolidated financial sanctions list (eu_fsf) excludes by scope: vessels under port-access and maritime-services bans, entities under export controls, and companies under sectoral financial restrictions. Screening against eu_journal_sanctions then covers the whole of EU restrictive measures.
The dataset grows from a few thousand entities to roughly 8,000. Most of the additions are persons and entities that eu_fsf already lists, so in the collections they merge with the existing eu_fsf entities and show both sources in datasets.
Documentation: EU sanctions from the Official Journal, and the eu_journal_sanctions dataset page.
New property: abbreviation (changelog)
Effective date (end of backwards compatibility): 2026-09-15
A new abbreviation property now stores shortened entity names (e.g. ANC, IKEA) separately from full names, allowing more precise matching on acronyms. For backward compatibility, values are currently copied to weakAlias. This backstop will be removed on September 15th, 2026. Data users are advised to integrate the new property before then. Support was added in yente 5.1.0.
Upcoming changes
Breaking change (on-premise yente): Upgrade to Elasticsearch 9 (changelog)
Effective date (end of life for 8): 2027-01-15
Elasticsearch 9 was released in April 2025, and the end of maintenance for version 8 is January 15, 2027. On-premise customers who are using Elasticsearch need to upgrade their Elastic server to version 9 before January 15, 2027. Current versions of yente are already compatible with both version 8 and 9 of the Elastic server, but yente 5.4.0 released in May 2026 is the last version compatible with Elastic server 8. You can find information on how to upgrade a standard single-node setup of Elastic in our documentation. For more advanced setups, please refer to the official Elastic documentation.
We recommend that on-premise customers perform this upgrade together with one of their upcoming upgrades of yente.
Retiring name-based and name-qualified matching algorithms (changelog)
Effective date: 2027-01-18
From January 2027, any /match calls using name-based or name-qualified will automatically start using the new ofac name matcher instead, since it does what name-based originally set out to do.
Recent changes
Distinguishing sanctioned control from more generally sanction.linked (blog post)
We’ve introduced a new topic, sanction.control, as a subset of sanction.linked that applies only to ownership or control relationships where an entity is owned in any part by a sanctioned entity. (The existing sanction.linked topic applies to all manner of relationships in any direction, one hop away from a sanctioned entity.) Read the blog post for more.
HTTP redirects from data.opensanctions.org (changelog)
Effective date: 2026-08-17
Since 17 August, the site may redirect users attempting to fetch a specific data export to an updated location.
The canonical location is now at /artifacts/<dataset>/<version>/, where previously a mix of /datasets/latest/<dataset> and /datasets/YYYYMMDD/<dataset> were used.
The goal of this change is to provide immutable addresses for each data export, helping to more clearly identify versions of the dataset.
Dataset removals and deprecations
Bulgaria National Terrorism Financing List: Direct sourcing (bg_mft_national) to replace OMNIO import (bg_omnio_poi) from November 16th (changelog).
Palestine Monetary Authority Local Freezing List (ps_local_freezing) to be removed November 16th (changelog).
Papua New Guinea Members of Parliament (pg_parliament) to be removed November 16th (changelog).
Turkmenistan Members of the Mejlis (tm_mejlis) to be removed November 16th (changelog).
New datasets
Switzerland Asset Freezes of Foreign Politically Exposed Persons (ch_fiaa_freezes)
And many more!
Quick reference
- Newsletter signup — To get these updates in your inbox
- Data dictionary — Full property and schema documentation
- Crawler planning — See what’s in progress and vote on priorities. Submit new data source requests via the request form or email support@opensanctions.org.
- Changelog — A record of significant data and API changes; see also yente release notes
- Community forum — Questions, discussion, and announcements
- Status page — Live service status and incident history