Vessel Screening

What is Vessel Screening? 

Vessel screening is the process of evaluating ships to ensure compliance with international, national, and local regulations, as well as to assess potential risks. This involves examining factors such as the vessel’s history, flag state, ownership, crew, cargo, and voyage details. Vessel screening helps identify threats, prevent illegal activities, and ensure maritime security and safety.

Why is Vessel Screening Important? 

Vessel screening is obviously important for shippers, as it ensures the safety and security of their cargo. Assessing potential risks and verifying compliance with regulations minimizes the chances of delays, detentions, or legal issues that could impact shipment timelines. 

It also protects shippers from engaging with vessels involved in illicit activities, safeguarding their reputation and business interests. Effective vessel screening reduces the risk of accidents and environmental incidents, promoting a reliable and responsible shipping process.

What are Some of the Factors Looked at During Vessel Screening?

Vessel screening includes the following factors:

• Vessel history: including previous detentions and inspections, past incidents or accidents, and maintenance and repair records
• Flag state: country of registry and its regulatory reputation
• Ownership and management: background checks and look at their history of compliance and involvement in illicit activities
• Cargo details: type and nature of cargo being transported
• Voyage information: route and destination analysis, ports of call, and transit regions
• Regulatory compliance: adherence to international, national, and local maritime laws, as well as compliance with environmental and safety regulations
• Sanctions and watchlists: check against international and national sanctions lists

Three Main Vessel Screening Challenges

Maintaining consistent workflows is particularly challenging when repetitive tasks are involved. This difficulty is amplified in expertise-specific domains, such as the shipping industry, where accurate decisions can take time, and time equals significant sums of money. This problem, together with the complexity and vastness of possible risks in the maritime ecosystem, raises three main challenges for stakeholders:

1. Lack of Human Expertise

One of the key industry challenges is hiring and training team members, according to Gartner. Maritime is a specialized area and the need for sanctions and risk experts far exceeds the supply. Organizations are struggling to hire, train, and onboard experts – both in terms of speed and the depth of domain understanding.

2. Decreased Productivity

The developing risk management requirements have significantly increased interactions between stakeholders across the entire supply chain. With a shortage of experts to manage these communications and increased due diligence complexity, relevant teams face productivity challenges with vessel risk screening tasks and communication that can be extremely time-consuming.

3. Standardized Communications

Increased interactions between stakeholders and counterparties raise a new standardization challenge. To increase efficiency and maintain alignment, organizations must standardize their queries and approach to counterparties.

How has Technology Changed Vessel Screening?

In the past, shippers were completely reliant on reporting from ports and maritime authorities. Vessel screening was a time-consuming process, where data was collected manually from paper records, physical logbooks, and direct communication with ship agents and operators. Once the data was gathered, a risk assessment was conducted based on the experience and judgment of those conducting the assessment, and was prone to errors. 

Solutions, such as Windward’s Maritime AI™ platform, have transformed that process into a real-time risk assessment based on multiple data sources collected directly from ships and third parties.   

The following table depicts the changes that have taken place in vessel screening over the past few years.

Windward’s Gen AI Agent – MAI Expert™

To address these challenges, Windward has expanded its Maritime AI™ portfolio to introduce MAI Expert™. The industry’s FIRST Gen AI agent is a virtual maritime risk subject matter expert that leverages Windward’s proprietary AI models, and human expertise, using innovative Gen AI engines.

How Does MAI Expert™ Work?

MAI Expert™ has been trained, and will continuously be trained, as a maritime and risk expert with the following areas of expertise:

• General maritime knowledge: ownership structures, vessels, port state control, P&I insurance, maritime expertise, and more.
• Sanctions knowledge: deceptive shipping practices, OFAC specific regulations and advisories, UK and OFSI advisories, and EU advisories.
• Windward’s unique product knowledge: Organization Defined Risk (ODR), Windward activities, and AI models. ODR enables users to tailor behavioral indicators to meet their unique business and risk needs. Indicators can be applied to both behavioral and static screening data sets.
• Adverse media: media screening for any negative news across various public media sources.

Efficiency and Risk Assessment

MAI Expert™ reviews and analyzes all aforementioned aspects to quickly generate a vessel profile risk assessment highlighting any gaps that may raise suspicion, discrepancies of note, and issues in need of escalated investigations, such as a company’s absence of insurance or a recent suspicious vessel ownership change.

This automatic assessment significantly enhances efficiency, eliminates the need for advanced sanctions expertise, and reduces vessel screening and investigation times by up to 20 minutes per screening on average. 

The expert risk assessment takes into account all sections of the extensive Windward vessel profile and generates additional insights beyond the standard risk configuration based on:

• Global regulatory risk indicators
• Risk indicators, as defined by the customer’s ODR settings
• General information crucial for the vessel screening process, such as P&I Club Insurance

By leveraging these insights, stakeholders can make informed decisions swiftly, ensuring compliance and mitigating risks efficiently.