Methodology

Each country is evaluated across fifteen independent risk dimensions. Every indicator is assigned a risk level — low, moderate, high, or severe — based on fixed, transparent thresholds derived from the source's own scale or established risk-assessment practice.

A composite risk band is then computed by evaluating the pattern of indicator-level results. A single adverse indicator does not dominate the composite; the algorithm considers both the number and the severity of risk-positive indicators to produce a balanced overall rating.

The composite score (0–100) reflects a weighted contribution across all available indicators, so a country with one severe indicator and otherwise low risk will score lower than a country with several severe indicators.

A minimum of two indicator groups with data is required to compute a composite rating. Where data is missing for a specific indicator, that dimension is excluded from the composite without penalising the country.

The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, Directive 2024/1760) requires large companies to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence across their own operations, subsidiaries, and value chains. S/1 is designed as a country-level triage and monitoring tool for CSDDD-aligned procurement due diligence — providing rapid intelligence on which jurisdictions carry elevated risk of adverse impacts.

Below is the mapping of S/1's fifteen indicator groups to specific CSDDD obligations. Each indicator serves one or more articles; the coverage level indicates whether S/1 provides full country-level signals, partial signals requiring entity-level follow-up, or no coverage (gap).

The screening engine compares a user-supplied name against 70,000+ active sanctions designations across 18 sanctions and debarment sources: OFAC SDN, EU Consolidated, UK FCDO, UN Security Council, Swiss SECO, DFAT Australia, Global Affairs Canada, World Bank Debarment, EBRD Ineligible, EIB Exclusion, SAM.gov Exclusions, US State Department, Treasury non-SDN, US BIS Export Controls (Entity List + Denied Persons + Unverified), UFLPA Entity List, ADB Debarment, IDB Group Debarment, and AfDB Debarment. It also matches against listed aliases and known spelling variants to catch alternative renderings of sanctioned names.

Matching uses a weighted ensemble of four complementary techniques, each contributing to a combined confidence score (0–1):

• Jaccard token overlap — measures how many words (tokens) the query and the target name share, normalised by the total number of unique tokens. Robust to word reordering and partial name matches.
• Dice coefficient on character bigrams — compares overlapping two-character sequences between the query and target. Effective at catching typographical errors and minor spelling variations.
• Levenshtein edit distance — counts the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions, or substitutions needed to transform one string into the other. Normalised by string length to produce a 0–1 score.
• Double Metaphone phonetic hashing — encodes names into pronunciation-based keys, so names that sound similar (e.g. Muhammad / Mohamed) hash to the same or nearby values regardless of spelling differences.

The four scores are combined into a weighted ensemble, with higher weight given to token-level matching for multi-word names and phonetic matching for single-word names. A configurable minimum confidence threshold (default 35%) filters results before they are returned.

Transliteration support covers Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian), Arabic, and Chinese (Simplified) scripts. Names in these scripts are automatically Romanised before comparison, enabling cross-script matching without requiring the user to know the original script.

When optional fields are provided — date of birth, passport or ID number, IMO number, address, or place of birth — the engine applies exact and near-exact matching on those fields as a secondary signal. A field-level match boosts the overall confidence score but is not required for a result to be returned.