Serial regtech founder here and in my last project, roughly 30% of opex went to screening/pep data. i paid it because the data providers were who they were: LexisNexis, Dow Jones, etc
This fall, i spent about 3 months, 300 hours in triage and about 20 billion tokens to get through the public and other difficult sources for sanctions, PEPs and enforcement lists, country by country. It helped that I was a compliance officer for about 10 years. I built it mainly for next regtech project. It now covers 200+ countries and refreshes every night. See here https://screen.unbackoffice.com/coverage
Date vendors insist you use their apps, and it can be pricey. I used to pay around €0.30 a screen. My fully loaded cost is about half a cent; and I can build apps for unique cases on top of this data freely.
To try it: screen.unbackoffice.com Repo : https://github.com/sect0rial/argus-screen
Some countries have thin PEP coverage. I’ll be around for questions.