Navigation:  Miscellaneous Screens > OFAC Search Screen > Soundex and Name Matching

For each name entered in an OFAC Search, both the customer name and the sanctioned name are converted to a Soundex representation. The following steps explain how Soundex works on this sample text:

 

"Ben Franklin was born on January 17, 1706."

 

1.The name or phrase we want to use Soundex for is converted to uppercase letters, and all special characters and numbers are removed. The result looks like the following example:

BEN FRANKLIN WAS BORN ON JANUARY

2.The first letter of each word is kept, and all the following letters are eliminated: A, E, H, I, O, U, W, and Y:

BN FRNKLN WS BRN ON JNR

3.Each word is converted to a six-letter Soundex code by keeping the first letter and replacing the remaining letters with numeric values until the code is six digits long or until the end of the word is reached. The replacement digit is not added if it is the same as the previous digit. If the end of the word is reached and the code isn’t six digits long, enough zeros are added to the end to make it six digits.

 

4.The letters are replaced according to the list below:

 

oB, F, P, and V are replaced by a "1."

oC, G, J, K, Q, S, X, and Z are replaced by a "2."

oD and T are replaced by a "3."

oL is replaced by a "4."

oM and N are replaced by a "5."

oR is replaced by a "6."

 

The result for the example text above is as follows:

B50000 F65245 W20000 B65000 O50000 J56000

When the matching process takes place, the following steps are used to evaluate the match:

 

1.For each six-letter Soundex code in the phrase, we look up any words on the sanctioned list that contain the same code.

 

2.We look at each code within the sanctioned item and compare how many of the sanctioned codes are within a certain number of words in the original phrase, to the current position in the phrase. By matching words within a certain proximity, we can avoid matching a word found at the beginning of a customer name with a word at the end of sanctioned name. For most names the entire name is matched, but the proximity matching helps to have fewer false positives for names containing several words. If a word in the phrase has already been matched, it will not be matched again when we process the next customer name word. Several customer names and sanctioned names have the same word twice in the name or similar words that map to the same Soundex code. The process ensures that we treat each occurrence of a word uniquely and do not match one word in the customer name to two words in the sanctioned name or vice versa.

 

3.Once the matches have been determined we determine the confidence of the match as follows:

 

a)If there is only one word in the sanctioned name, the customer name must also have only one word, and they must have a Soundex match.

 

b)When there is more than one word in the sanctioned name, the name is considered to be a suspect as shown in the table below.

 

 

Additional institution options can be applied to help reduce the number of false positives in OFAC searches. See OFAC Institution Options for more information.