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moov-io/watchman

Moov's mission is to give developers an easy way to create and integrate bank processing into their own software products. Our open source projects are each focused on solving a single responsibility in financial services and designed around performance, scalability, and ease of use.

What is Watchman?

Moov Watchman is a high-performance sanctions screening and compliance tool that helps businesses meet their regulatory obligations. It provides an HTTP server and Go library for searching against multiple global sanctions and screening lists.

Key Features

• Comprehensive Coverage: Integrates multiple global watchlists in one unified system
• High-Performance Search: Optimized for speed and accuracy using advanced matching algorithms
• Flexible Integration: HTTP API and Go library for easy integration into your systems
• Automated Updates: Regular refreshes of watchlist data to ensure compliance

Included Lists

Watchman integrates the following lists to help you maintain global compliance:

Source	List
US Treasury	Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
US Government	Consolidated Screening List (CSL)

Future Lists

The v0.50+ series of Watchman has revamped its search engine. The following lists are being re-added into Watchman.

Source	List
European Union	Consolidated Sanctions List
United Kingdom	OFSI Sanctions List
United Kingdom	Sanctions List (Disabled by default)

v2 Endpoints (v0.50+ series and beyond)

The v0.50+ series of Watchman has introduced a new v2 search endpoint and removed the older endpoint. This was done to offer a unified response model, improve overall performance, and work towards a stable v1.0 release.

We encourage you to try out the new Watchman and report any issues or requests in slack (#watchman channel).

Project status

Moov Watchman is actively used in multiple production environments. Please star the project if you are interested in its progress. If you have layers above Watchman to simplify tasks, perform business operations, or found bugs we would appreciate an issue or pull request. Thanks!

Usage

The Watchman project implements an HTTP server and Go library for searching against Watchman.

Government lists are downloaded (and refreshed), parsed, prepared, normalized, and indexed in-memory. Searches operate concurrently and do not require an external database or connection.

Docker

We publish a public Docker image moov/watchman from Docker Hub or use this repository. No configuration is required to serve on :8084. We also have Docker images for OpenShift published as quay.io/moov/watchman. Lastly, we offer a moov/watchman:static Docker image with files from 2019. This image can be useful for faster local testing or consistent results.

Pull & start the Docker image:

docker pull moov/watchman:latest
docker run -p 8084:8084 moov/watchman:latest

Run a search for an individual or business:

curl -s "http://localhost:8084/v2/search?name=Nicolas+Maduro&type=person&limit=1&minMatch=0.75" | jq .

{
  "entities": [
    {
      "name": "Nicolas MADURO MOROS",
      "entityType": "person",
      "sourceList": "us_ofac",
      "sourceID": "22790",
      "person": {
        "name": "Nicolas MADURO MOROS",
        "altNames": null,
        "gender": "male",
        "birthDate": "1962-11-23T00:00:00Z",
        "deathDate": null,
        "titles": [
          "President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela"
        ],
        "governmentIDs": [
          {
            "type": "cedula",
            "country": "Venezuela",
            "identifier": "5892464"
          }
        ]
      },
      "business": null,
      "organization": null,
      "aircraft": null,
      "vessel": null,
      "contact": {
        "emailAddresses": null,
        "phoneNumbers": null,
        "faxNumbers": null,
        "websites": null
      },
      "addresses": null,
      "cryptoAddresses": null,
      "affiliations": null,
      "sanctionsInfo": null,
      "historicalInfo": null,
      "sourceData": {
        "entityID": "22790",
        "sdnName": "MADURO MOROS, Nicolas",
        "sdnType": "individual",
        "program": [
          "VENEZUELA",
          "IRAN-CON-ARMS-EO"
        ],
        "title": "President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela",
        "callSign": "",
        "vesselType": "",
        "tonnage": "",
        "grossRegisteredTonnage": "",
        "vesselFlag": "",
        "vesselOwner": "",
        "remarks": "DOB 23 Nov 1962; POB Caracas, Venezuela; citizen Venezuela; Gender Male; Cedula No. 5892464 (Venezuela); President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."
      },
      "match": 0.7784062500000001
    }
  ]
}

Data persistence

By design, Watchman does not persist (save) any data about the search queries or lists pulled from external sources. Watchman can store ingested files (the individual records) in a MySQL or PostgreSQL database for concurrent access. External lists that are downloaded on startup (and refreshed periodically) are only kept in memory. No encryption of data in-memory is performed.

Configuration

Watchman recommends file-based configuration but supports environmental variable options.

FAQ

Reporting hits to OFAC

OFAC requires reporting of positive hits. Work with your Financial Institution for complete details.

Useful resources

• OFAC Sanctions Search Page
• Subscribe for OFAC email updates
• When should I call the OFAC Hotline?
• BIS Denied Persons List with Denied US Export Privileges (DPL)
• BIS Entity List
• Sectoral Sanctions Identifications (SSI)
• US Sanctions Search FAQ

Getting help

channel	info
Project Documentation	Our project documentation available online.
Twitter @moov	You can follow Moov.io's Twitter feed to get updates on our project(s). You can also tweet us questions or just share blogs or stories.
GitHub Issue	If you are able to reproduce a problem please open a GitHub Issue under the specific project that caused the error.
moov-io slack	Join our slack channel (#watchman) to have an interactive discussion about the development of the project.

If you find a security issue please contact us at [email protected].

Supported and tested platforms

• 64-bit Linux (Ubuntu, Debian), macOS, and Windows

Contributing

Yes please! Checkout our issues for first time contributors for something to help out with.

Building Watchman's source code follows standard Go commands. You can use make build to compile the code and make check to run linters and tests.

Run make install to setup gopostal / libpostal for Watchman.

Related projects

As part of Moov's initiative to offer open source fintech infrastructure, we have a large collection of active projects you may find useful:

• Moov Fed implements utility services for searching the United States Federal Reserve System such as ABA routing numbers, financial institution name lookup, and FedACH and Fedwire routing information.

• Moov Image Cash Letter implements Image Cash Letter (ICL) files used for Check21, X.9 or check truncation files for exchange and remote deposit in the U.S.

• Moov Wire implements an interface to write files for the Fedwire Funds Service, a real-time gross settlement funds transfer system operated by the United States Federal Reserve Banks.

• Moov ACH provides ACH file generation and parsing, supporting all Standard Entry Codes for the primary method of money movement throughout the United States.

• Moov Metro 2 provides a way to easily read, create, and validate Metro 2 format, which is used for consumer credit history reporting by the United States credit bureaus.

License

Apache License 2.0 - See LICENSE for details.