The firm is fined. The person moves on.

Enforcement lands on companies. The fine is paid by the firm, the undertaking is given by the firm, and the press release is about the firm, which is convenient for the people who ran it, because a company can be wound up and a career cannot. The individual moves to the next firm and arrives at your onboarding with nothing against their name. Two more enforcement registers and Australia's register of banned people are now screened, and between them they cover both halves of that.

Enforcement, in more places

The CFTC brings the US derivatives markets into scope: fraud, manipulation, spoofing and unregistered activity in futures, swaps and event contracts, which is territory the SEC lists do not cover. The Monetary Authority of Singapore adds a jurisdiction rather than a subject: prohibition orders, civil penalties, reprimands and criminal convictions for market misconduct, unlicensed activity and anti-money-laundering failures.

With the SEC releases, proceedings and suspensions already here, alongside the BaFin and FCA warning lists, regulator enforcement now spans the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Singapore, and one search covers all of it.

The party, not the headline

Regulators publish actions, not lists of people, and the difference matters when you are searching by name. A CFTC action is titled as a sentence: an order against somebody to pay a sum of money. A name search will never match that. So each action is broken down into the parties actually named in its orders and complaints, and each of those becomes a record in its own right. One action can therefore produce several matches, which is the correct answer when it named several respondents.

Bans name people

The other half is ASIC's register of banned and disqualified persons, which is over six thousand bans: people barred from providing financial services or credit, or disqualified from managing corporations at all. Each carries the type of ban and the period it runs for, and one person can appear several times where several bans have been imposed on them. The companion register of banned organisations is screened too.

This is the register that catches the director rather than the vehicle. A disqualification follows the person through every company they subsequently attach themselves to, which is exactly what an enforcement action against a dissolved firm fails to do.

Where it fits

The natural place is wherever you already screen the people behind a corporate customer rather than the company alone: directors, beneficial owners, signatories. It is also worth running over introducers, advisers and agents, who are rarely onboarded with the same rigour as customers and are precisely the population these registers describe.

None of this requires knowing which regulator publishes what. A name check runs against these registers at the same time as the sanctions, PEP, wanted and debarment sources, and every match opens the published record with a link back to the regulator.

As with everything outside the sanctions lists, read what a match actually is. An enforcement action or a ban is a matter of record, published by the authority that imposed it. It is not, however, a sanctions designation, and the record names the register it came from so the two are never confused.

The regulator enforcement and warnings and regulatory bans and disqualifications coverage pages list every register with its publisher and the fields a record carries.