Strategy Guide
Build vs Buy Sanctions Screening
Should you build sanctions screening in-house or buy an API? A practical framework for compliance and engineering leaders.
Comparison
| Factor | Build | Buy |
|---|---|---|
| Initial build time | 3–6 months | 1–2 days |
| Engineering team | 2–4 engineers full-time | 1 engineer part-time |
| Data source maintenance | Ongoing — 50+ sources, daily syncs | Handled by vendor |
| False positive tuning | Months of iteration | Published benchmark, ongoing improvements |
| Audit evidence | Build yourself | Evidence Capsule built-in |
| Customization | Full control | Configurable thresholds, custom lists (Enterprise) |
| Cost at scale | High fixed cost + headcount | Pay per use, starts at $0 |
| Latency SLA | You own it | p50 45ms, p99 276ms published |
Build if…
- You have a dedicated compliance engineering team with ML/NLP expertise
- Your entity resolution needs are highly specialized (e.g., Chinese corporate structures)
- You already maintain sanctions data for other purposes
- Regulatory requirements mandate in-house processing with no third-party access
Buy if…
- You need to go live in weeks, not quarters
- Your team does not have spare engineering capacity for data pipeline maintenance
- You need audit-ready evidence without building a decision-log system
- You want benchmarked accuracy without running your own test suite
- You need coverage of 50+ sources without managing 50+ ingestion jobs
Honest framing: Verifex is a buy option. We believe most teams should buy screening infrastructure and focus engineering resources on their core product. If you have unique requirements that justify building in-house, we can serve as a secondary benchmark layer during development.