FusionLabs Professional Training

Countering Proliferation Finance and Sanctions Evasion in Practice

A practical online course for professionals who need to identify, assess, escalate, and document proliferation-finance and sanctions-evasion risk.

Format Self-paced online
Curriculum Eight learning sessions
Method Interactive casework
Resources Practitioner toolkit
Completion Certificate included

Course overview

Move beyond sanctions screening

Financial institutions increasingly need to identify and manage proliferation-finance and sanctions-evasion risk. Screening remains important, but it rarely provides the whole answer.

Effective risk management also requires an understanding of customer activity, procurement networks, corporate structures, trade routes, sensitive goods, payment patterns, and the explanations provided by customers.

This course develops the practical judgement needed to bring those fragments together and determine when activity can be cleared, when additional information is required, and when escalation or other action is appropriate.

Why this course

Training built around decisions

The course does not ask learners simply to memorize regulations or lists of red flags. It teaches them how to assess risk clusters, ask better questions, and make proportionate, defensible decisions.

Proliferation finance rarely appears as an obviously prohibited payment. It may appear as a transaction for industrial equipment, electronics, laboratory supplies, software, machinery, or technical services.

The customer and counterparty may not be listed. The payment may not involve a comprehensively sanctioned jurisdiction. Concern may arise only when several facts are considered together.

Participants therefore work through realistic scenarios in which information is incomplete, explanations may be plausible, and the correct response depends on careful, risk-based judgement.

Who should attend

Designed for financial-crime and compliance professionals

The course is suitable for professionals who encounter sanctions, customer, transaction, trade, or strategic technology risk.

  • Sanctions compliance professionals
  • AML and financial-crime teams
  • KYC and customer due diligence analysts
  • Transaction monitoring and investigations teams
  • Trade finance specialists
  • Correspondent banking teams
  • Export control and trade compliance professionals
  • Government regulators and supervisors
  • Financial Intelligence Units
  • Customs and law enforcement agencies
  • International organizations
  • Nonproliferation practitioners

No prior knowledge of export controls or proliferation finance is required.

Learning outcomes

What you will be able to do

Explain how proliferation finance overlaps with sanctions evasion, export controls, AML/CFT, and trade finance.

Recognize how procurement and sanctions-evasion networks conceal parties, end users, goods, and payment flows.

Identify meaningful indicators across customers, counterparties, ownership, goods, routing, payments, and behaviour.

Distinguish routine commercial activity from cases requiring additional information or enhanced review.

Apply a structured methodology to customer reviews, transaction investigations, and trade-finance cases.

Decide when activity should be cleared, paused, escalated, rejected, blocked, or reported.

Document investigations and decisions clearly and defensibly.

Understand the core elements of an effective institutional control framework.

Curriculum

Eight practical learning sessions

Open each section to view the focus of the session.

Orientation

Introduction to the course methodology, practitioner toolkit, and structured risk-based approach used throughout the programme.

Session 1 — What proliferation finance is and why it matters

Understand the nature of proliferation finance, its relationship to other financial-crime risks, and how financial institutions encounter it in practice.

Session 2 — The legal and regulatory architecture

Explore UN Security Council obligations, FATF standards, national sanctions regimes, supervisory expectations, and institutional responsibilities.

Session 3 — How proliferation and sanctions-evasion networks operate

Examine procurement networks, front companies, intermediaries, ownership structures, trade channels, logistics networks, and revenue-generation schemes.

Session 4 — What financial institutions are expected to do

Understand practical expectations for governance, customer due diligence, transaction review, trade finance, escalation, reporting, and recordkeeping.

Session 5 — Red flags, risk indicators, and escalation logic

Identify indicators across customers, counterparties, ownership, goods, payments, routes, documentation, and behaviour—and assess them as risk clusters rather than in isolation.

Session 6 — Screening, monitoring, and control design

Examine the contribution and limitations of sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, customer controls, and broader institutional systems.

Session 7 — Casework: practical scenarios

Apply the methodology to realistic scenarios and publicly reported proliferation-finance and sanctions-evasion typologies.

Session 8 — Building a control framework

Bring together governance, risk assessment, due diligence, monitoring, escalation, reporting, training, and assurance into an effective institutional framework.

Final assessment and scenario

Complete a formal assessment and an interactive capstone scenario requiring application of the full course methodology.

Included resources

FusionLabs Practitioner Toolkit

Participants receive reusable working materials designed to support customer reviews, investigations, trade-finance assessments, and institutional control design.

Analyst Desk Guide

A concise operational reference summarizing the course methodology.

Risk Indicator Checklist

Structured indicators covering parties, goods, payments, routing, ownership, documentation, and behaviour.

Enhanced Due Diligence Template

Practical wording for requesting proportionate information from customers.

Case Note Template and Examples

A framework for recording investigations, reasoning, decisions, and next steps.

Control Design Checklist

A structured resource for reviewing screening, monitoring, escalation, and governance controls.

Typologies and Case Studies Pack

Practical summaries of publicly reported proliferation-finance and sanctions-evasion cases.

Learning experience

Active, applied, and professionally relevant

Interactive

Knowledge checks, decision exercises, scenarios, and a final capstone reinforce learning throughout the course.

Case-based

Publicly reported cases and realistic compliance situations connect international requirements to operational practice.

Immediately applicable

Downloadable templates, guides, and checklists can be adapted for use within institutional procedures.

Organizational training

Training for teams and institutions

FusionLabs can provide private online cohorts, instructor-led virtual delivery, in-person workshops, executive briefings, and customized programmes aligned with your institution's policies, risk profile, and operational environment.

Discuss organizational training 

Start the course

Build practical proliferation-finance capability

Develop the knowledge, judgement, workflows, and tools needed to identify risk and make proportionate, defensible compliance decisions.