OFSI Strategy 2026-2029 Marks Ten-Year Anniversary

This year marks ten years since the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) was established.

Over the last ten years, OFSI has built stronger capability and confidence, enhancing licensing, enforcement and intelligence, deepening international partnerships, and supporting firms to navigate increasingly complex sanctions regimes.

This Strategy marks the start of OFSI’s second decade, setting out an ambitious agenda for 2026–29 to keep UK financial sanctions effective, resilient and impactful.

At its heart is the new, clear operating model: we will Promote, Enable, Respond and Change (PERC).

• Promote: make sanctions rules and expectations clearer, so compliance is the norm and non-compliance has visible consequences.

• Enable: reduce friction for legitimate activity through practical guidance, strong licensing service standards and digital-first services.

• Respond: act quickly and proportionately on breaches, using the full enforcement toolkit to deter and disrupt non-compliance and circumvention.

• Change: embed lasting improvements by learning from cases and engagement, strengthening sanctions design and driving sustained compliance cultures.
  We will focus our policy and operational decisions—and our resources—on the areas of greatest impact, grounded in high-quality data, evidence and a stronger understanding of threats, risks and context. We will deliver timely and proportionate licensing, proactive and impactful enforcement, robust and targeted counterterrorism designations, and focused compliance support in our highest impact areas.

We will maintain open, regular engagement with industry to understand how sanctions are operating in practice and to make compliance as clear and workable as possible. We will provide more direct support to industry, to support compliance and reduce friction across the system. We will use a feedback-loop approach: insights from firms’ queries, licensing applications, compliance challenges and suspected breach reporting will inform where we target guidance, which scenarios we prioritise for clarification, and how we design and improve our services. In turn, we will feed learning back to industry through timely updates—such as blogs, FAQs, guidance and lessons learned from enforcement—so that firms can strengthen controls, reduce repeat issues and respond quickly to emerging risks.

We will work in close partnership across government, with regulators and law enforcement, and with the private sector and international allies to strengthen the impact of UK financial sanctions and support effective compliance. We will use structured engagement and information-sharing to build a shared understanding of emerging risks and circumvention typologies, align expectations and guidance where possible, and coordinate action to reduce arbitrage and close gaps. Through these partnerships, we will improve the quality of compliance support, target our operational activity more effectively, and amplify the deterrent effect of enforcement.

The Strategy sets out Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) against which we will monitor our progress under the Strategy. We will report against these in our Annual Review starting with the next publication this Autumn.

Tags: Engagement, Strategy

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About OFSI

OFSI helps ensure financial sanctions are properly understood, implemented and enforced in the United Kingdom. This includes the Oil Price Cap on Russian oil.

OFSI is part of HM Treasury.

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