I've looked in the infovault and found nothing on this. To what degree does a typical small bank enter data - just the name? What about the address? (city/state/ZIP/country). How can we identify someone being associated with a country like Cuba without putting in the address? Or does OFAC software only need the name? For example, let's say John Smith in London is on the SDN list. Our John Smith in Mayberry, USA is not on the list. Does the OFAC software know the difference? Or will it report all John Smiths and the address is irrelevant.

I think it depends on your vendor.

We use Bridger Insight. We run checks on almost everything and it will hit if the name or address matches. For example, on IATs we run the address of the sender and it will always "hit" when we enter in South Korea because it just matches to Korea. When we run our entire membership through the system, John Smith will match John Smith, regardless of the address, ssn, dob, etc. I have to go in and manually list the differences that make it a false positive.

We generally run the information we have in front of us. If all we have is the name, that is all we run.

This is a great source for both. It is directly from OFAC. If we get a potential match on the name, we can check the address.
http://sdnsearch.ofac.treas.gov/