How Gulf Marine Tripled Vessel Screening Volume with Windward API

About Gulf Marine

Gulf Marine is a leading marine lubricants supplier to the global shipping industry, engaging with a wide range of vessels every single day. That global footprint brings volume. And with volume comes risk.

As a supplier with exposure to OFAC, EU, and UK sanctions regimes, Gulf Marine must be certain that every vessel it supplies is clean: not sanctioned, not owned by a sanctioned entity, and not engaged in deceptive shipping practices. Vessel screening sits at the heart of the company’s compliance and internal control framework, protecting the business from legal, financial, and reputational exposure.

A Lean Team, Rising Volumes, and Partial Coverage

Before integrating Windward’s API, screening at Gulf Marine was almost entirely manual, carried out by a small team handling a high volume of daily transactions.

Analysts pulled data from disparate sources to piece together a picture of each vessel: historical routes, port calls in higher-risk jurisdictions, ownership structures. Cross-checking those sources vessel by vessel was slow, and the tools answered questions about ownership and history, not about behavior. Deceptive shipping practices sat outside what those sources could show.

The consequences were felt across the operation:

• Incomplete coverage. With limited capacity, the team could only prioritize higher-risk profiles. Lower-risk vessels were delayed or deprioritized, leaving visibility gaps across the wider book of transactions.
• Slow turnaround. Manual investigation created bottlenecks, with considerable back-and-forth with customers to verify vessel behavior.
• Limited risk visibility. Screening confirmed whether a vessel or owner was sanctioned but could not surface the behavioral indicators that increasingly define maritime sanctions risk.
  

Regulators Moved to Behavior — Screening Had to Follow

This visibility gap mattered more with every passing year. Successive EU packages placed growing weight on how a vessel behaves, not only on who owns it or whether it appears on a list — and a screening process built around ownership and designation could no longer answer the question regulators were asking.

100% Coverage, Automatically, with the Windward API

Gulf Marine embedded the Windward API directly into its inquiry workflow. Every vessel inquiry that enters the business is now screened automatically against Gulf Marine’s own risk parameters.

The workflow is straightforward. Vessels that come back low risk are cleared automatically and the transaction proceeds. Vessels flagged as higher risk are escalated from the Windward platform to the Internal Control Team where they run a deeper investigation with the full behavioral picture in front of them: routes, port calls, ownership, and deceptive shipping indicators summarized at a glance.

Business Benefits for Gulf Marine

Six months on from integration, the impact is measurable across coverage, capacity and analyst focus:

• 100% screening coverage. Every vessel inquiry is screened — approximately 300 a day globally — instead of only those with a high-risk profile.
• Nearly triple the screening volume. Manual screening previously covered less than 100 vessels a day. The API now handles roughly 300, automatically.
• Behavioral risk, not just sanctions status. Screening now covers how a vessel operates, in line with where regulatory focus has moved — an assessment the team previously could not make at all.
• Analysis time redirected to real risk. Clear-cut, low risk cases clear without human review, so the team’s expertise is spent on the high and moderate-risk cases that genuinely require judgment.
• Faster response times. Automated clearance removes the manual bottleneck and accelerates decisions back to customers.
• Consistent global policy. A single set of risk parameters is applied across all regions, removing regional variation from compliance outcomes.
• A stronger compliance posture. Documented, systematic screening of every transaction gives Gulf Marine evidence to present to insurers, auditors, and counterparties with confidence.

Looking Ahead

The API integration has been a significant step for Gulf Marine. With coverage no longer the constraint, the team’s focus is shifting from baseline screening towards deeper validation and continuous monitoring.

Windward’s Risk & Compliance Solution

Windward’s Maritime AI™ Risk & Compliance solution translates regulatory change into AI models, identifying approximately 97% of sanctioned vessels before they are officially designated. Delivered via API or platform, it gives compliance teams behavioral risk insight, not just static ownership data, so they can screen at scale without adding headcount.

Beyond ownership and sanctions status, the platform surfaces the behavioral indicators regulators now scrutinize  GPS jamming, ship-to-ship transfers, questionable port calls, and identity or data discrepancies — with the key risks summarized at a glance so analysts can go straight to what matters. In complex cases, Windward’s support engineers work alongside the customer’s team to validate what the platform has flagged.

Having a clear and defensible risk assessment at the point of refusal is critical. Declining a transaction means making the case to the customer on the other end of it, so Gulf Marine pairs the platform’s output with its own analysts’ judgment and Windward’s validation to substantiate every assessment before going back to a customer.

Screening at Scale

Windward’s Maritime AI™ Risk & Compliance solution assesses vessels on behavior as well as ownership and sanctions status. Used through the platform, or embedded directly into existing workflows via API, as Gulf Marine has done.

See What Full Screening Coverage Would Look Like in Your Own Workflow