n8n workflow for KYC/EDD case escalation in South African banking compliance: risk scoring, sanctions/PEP screening, tiered case routing.
# KYC / EDD Case Escalation Workflow
An n8n automation modeling a South African bank's KYC (Know Your Customer)
and EDD (Enhanced Due Diligence) case-escalation flow: a new or
periodic-review customer record comes in, gets screened against real
sanctions/PEP data, gets a composite AML risk score, and is routed to
auto-approval, standard CDD, or full EDD escalation — with every decision
written to an audit trail.
Built as a portfolio project by a cybersecurity engineer moving into
financial-services compliance automation, and framed against a live
regulatory hook: South Africa officially exited the FATF grey list on
24 October 2025, making sustained, demonstrable AML/KYC compliance
automation directly relevant to South African banks right now.
## What it does
1. Receives a case via webhook (customer ID, name, entity type,
jurisdiction, occupation, expected turnover, declared source of funds).
2. Validates the payload — malformed or missing required fields are
rejected with an HTTP 400 and an itemized error list, not silently
passed through as nulls.
3. Screens the customer against the OpenSanctions
Screening API (460+ sources, 1.9M+ sanctioned/PEP entities).
4. Calculates a composite 0–100 risk score from sanctions/PEP hits,
high-risk jurisdiction, cash-intensive entity type, and high expected
turnover — weights and thresholds are externalized into a single
config node, not hardcoded.
5. Routes the case:
- **Low** → auto-approved, annual review cycle.
- **Medium** → standard CDD, additional documents requested, analyst
notified.
- **High** → full EDD escalation, MLRO notified via Microsoft Teams,
account placed on hold, flagged as an STR filing candidate.
6. Writes every decision to an audit log and returns the outcome to the
caller.
## Architecture
```
Webhook (Header-Auth protected)
→ Validate Payload ──(invalid)──→ HTTP 400 + error list
→ Risk Config (jurisdictions / entity types / weights / thresholds)
→ Normalize Case Data
→ Sanctions & PEP Screening (Ope …