A name on an American sanctions list is not, on its own, a lawful reason to deny someone a basic bank account. That was the message from the Court of Justice of the European Union on 11 June, in a judgment that clarifies where a bank’s duty to fight financial crime ends and a consumer’s right to basic financial services begins.

The case, C-81/24, known as Jenec, came out of Slovenia. A consumer identified as LH was refused a basic payment account by OTP banka after his name surfaced on a list kept by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control, the sanctions body better known by its initials, OFAC. Crucially, LH had not been convicted of the offence behind his listing, and he was subject to no sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the European Union or Slovenia itself. The bank’s refusal rested on the OFAC entry alone.

The Court held that this was not enough. The mere presence of a customer’s name on an OFAC list, or on any comparable register drawn up by a country outside the Union, does not automatically bar a bank from opening an account. A refusal is permissible only after the institution carries out its own individual assessment of the money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk the customer actually presents. A third-country listing may feed into that judgment as one factor among several, but it cannot substitute for it.

The ruling threads a needle that has troubled compliance officers for years. European law guarantees consumers legally resident in the Union access to a payment account with basic features, a right meant to prevent financial exclusion. At the same time, banks labour under strict anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing obligations that can require them to walk away from risky relationships. The two duties pull in opposite directions, and the fear of American secondary sanctions has often tipped European banks toward caution, treating any OFAC hit as a red line.

By insisting on a genuine, case-by-case evaluation, the Court has told lenders they cannot hide behind a foreign list to justify a blanket refusal. The judgment does not force banks to onboard customers where doing so would breach their own legal obligations; it simply forbids using anti-money-laundering rules as a pretext. A screening hit, in the Court’s logic, is the start of an inquiry, not its conclusion.

The practical consequences will ripple through compliance departments across the Union. Automated systems that flag and reject in a single motion will need a human step, a documented risk analysis capable of standing up to challenge. That is more work, and it reintroduces judgment into a process many institutions had quietly automated. It also sharpens a long-running tension: the extraterritorial reach of American sanctions has for years shaped the behaviour of European banks, and the Court has now drawn a line asserting that Union law, not a Washington list, governs access to basic accounts on Union soil.

For consumers caught in the widening net of third-country designations, often without any charge or conviction, the decision restores a measure of due process. For the wider debate over Europe’s financial sovereignty, it is a small but pointed reminder that rights written into Union law are not meant to bend automatically to rules written elsewhere.