Vessel Sanctions Risk Assessment System

Overview

A mission-critical regulatory compliance system for automated EU sanctions screening of maritime vessel voyages at Metinvest Group — a $12B+ enterprise with global shipping operations. The system replaced a manual, error-prone compliance review process with a fully automated, auditable pipeline capable of processing hundreds of voyages annually. Regulatory defensibility was a hard requirement: every automated decision had to be traceable, explainable, and audit-ready.

Achievements

• Automated screening of hundreds of vessel voyages per year — compliance team shifted from full document review to exception handling only. • Two-layer architecture (rule-based screening + LLM for ambiguous cases) reduced false positives while maintaining zero-miss accuracy on sanctioned entities. • Full audit trail on every decision ensured regulatory defensibility — zero findings during external compliance audits. • End-to-end pipeline from SAP trigger to auto-decision writeback achieved without any manual handoffs for clear-cut cases.

Responsibilities

• Designed the complete pipeline architecture: SAP (IMO trigger) → Azure Blob Storage → PDF ingestion → OCR extraction → rule-based EU sanctions screening → LLM scoring for ambiguous cases → auto-decision or Teams escalation (human-in-the-loop) → writeback to SAP.
• Implemented a two-layer compliance engine combining deterministic rule-based logic for clear cases with LLM-based probabilistic scoring for ambiguous vessel records.
• Built a full audit trail subsystem ensuring every decision — automated or escalated — was logged with decision rationale for regulatory review.
• Integrated with Azure Blob Storage (Managed Identity), SAP, and Microsoft Teams API for human-in-the-loop escalation workflows.
• Engineered the system for zero third-party data exposure — all inference ran on self-hosted infrastructure within the corporate perimeter.

Technologies Used