The Best PEP Coverage in Canada, Built From Scratch

There's a fatal flaw in most AML programs in Canada, and it starts with your screening tooling. Most platforms don't meet FINTRAC's expectations for coverage of politically exposed persons (PEPs), and that leaves compliance teams with one of two problems: hits that never fire, or a manual search on every customer to cover the gap.

OpenSanctions, the open dataset many screening engines build on, contains about 4,000 PEP records for Canada. FINTRAC's definition reaches far more people than that, all the way down to the mayor of any town or rural municipality, whatever its population.

We've seen it over and over: a screen comes back clean on a legacy platform, and a simple Google search still turns up the risk. That's not good enough. An examiner will run that search too.

So Minerva built its own Canadian PEP data from scratch, to give your team the best PEP coverage in Canada with no manual searches and no second-guessing.

Why good PEP data is hard

When you already know a name, a date of birth, and a place, finding a politically exposed person is fairly easy. The hard part is proactively finding every place a PEP can appear: every election in every city, town, and township, Indigenous band councils, judicial appointments, and more, across thousands of sites that change with every election cycle. There's no national PEP database. The data sits unstructured across the internet.

And those sources almost never publish what screening actually needs: a date of birth and a geography. A name alone produces false positives. You might know a John Doe was elected mayor of a small Canadian village, but thousands of John Does can match that name, and the town doesn't publish the detail that tells them apart.

How we built it

Imagine an army of web researchers, thousands of them, working 24/7: reading every city website, every Indigenous band council's meeting minutes, every local election result. A lot of current data providers build their PEP lists through manual curation and data entry, and it's also their limiting factor. With AI agents, there's no limit to the scale and depth of the data, and the consistent discipline that ensures its quality.

Minerva's agents started from FINTRAC's definition and swept live data on the internet for every place a PEP could appear, from published judicial lists to federal websites. That alone results in nearly 16,000 potential PEPs, over 4x the coverage of most providers.

To prevent false positives, once a PEP was found, agents then built a contextual profile around each name, the way an analyst would: researching the person, capturing the evidence, and attaching verified locations and either a published date of birth or an estimated age range where no public data exists. Age ranges are estimated based on research logic: agents review the contextual information like years in office, dates of graduation, and other cues to walk back into a probable range with confidence scores. The coverage runs from federal and provincial officials, judges, and military officers to Indigenous chiefs, city councillors, and the mayors and reeves of towns as small as 500 people.

What your team gets

Real politically exposed persons surface at onboarding, because the coverage reaches them. Wrong matches get ruled out before an analyst opens them: a 19-year-old customer matching the name of a senator estimated in his fifties or sixties scores down automatically. The research is already done and fully cited with primary sources, so no one on your team is googling customers to feel covered. Fewer unresolvable hits mean fewer document requests mid-onboarding. And every record keeps its sources, so when an examiner asks why a name did or didn't fire, the evidence is on file.

The data stays current too: the PEP list is updated quarterly, adding newly elected officials and tracking who leaves office.

Get started

Canadian PEP coverage runs inside Minerva screening now: every customer is checked against sanctions, politically exposed persons, and adverse media at onboarding and in ongoing monitoring.

FINTRAC expects the coverage. Minerva built it.

Want to see who it finds in your own customer base? Book a walkthrough or email support@gominerva.com.