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The unified orchestration layer for wallets and alternative payments
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The secure repository for all your payment methods
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Workflow-driven payments intelligence for smarter routing and higher auth rates
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A flexible fraud and authentication layer. Instantly add advanced fraud tools and 3DS
One integration to sell inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and every agentic platform
The visual workflow builder that ties fraud, identity, and payment routing together in one place
The unified orchestration layer for wallets and alternative payments
The secure repository for all your payment methods
Workflow-driven payments intelligence for smarter routing and higher auth rates
A flexible fraud and authentication layer. Instantly add advanced fraud tools and 3DS
One integration to sell inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and every agentic platform
The visual workflow builder that ties fraud, identity, and payment routing together in one place
Sanctions Screening
Sanctions screening is the process of checking the parties to a financial transaction, the payer, the payee, and associated entities, against government and international sanctions lists to ensure that the transaction does not involve a sanctioned individual, organization, or jurisdiction. Financial institutions and regulated payment businesses are legally prohibited from processing transactions for sanctioned parties, and sanctions violations carry severe penalties.
The primary sanctions lists relevant to US-based payment businesses are maintained by the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), the US Treasury's enforcement arm for economic and trade sanctions. OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list is the most comprehensive, covering individuals and entities subject to US sanctions for terrorism, weapons proliferation, narcotics trafficking, human rights abuses, and other designations. Non-US businesses with significant US operations or US-dollar transactions are also subject to OFAC jurisdiction.
Other major sanctions regimes include the EU's consolidated sanctions list, the United Nations Security Council consolidated list, the UK's financial sanctions list (maintained by OFIS after Brexit), and various national sanctions lists maintained by individual countries. Payment businesses operating internationally typically screen against multiple lists simultaneously.
Sanctions screening must occur before a transaction is processed, not after. A payment processed to a sanctioned party is a violation regardless of whether it was later discovered, the obligation is to check before processing. Real-time screening, submitting party names and identifiers to a sanctions database API during the transaction flow, is the standard approach for payment businesses handling high volumes. Batch screening of stored customer databases is used to catch sanctions additions for existing customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What information is screened against sanctions lists?
Party names (individual and business), aliases, and variations are the primary screening targets. Additional identifiers, national ID numbers, passport numbers, company registration numbers, addresses, and date of birth, are used to disambiguate matches when names are common. Payment businesses also screen geographic identifiers: IP addresses from sanctioned countries, shipping addresses in sanctioned territories, and phone numbers or billing addresses indicating sanctioned jurisdictions trigger additional scrutiny.
What happens when a sanctions screening match is found?
Confirmed matches must be blocked and reported. The payment transaction is declined, and the match must be reported to the relevant authority, in the US, to OFAC via a blocked property report or rejected transaction report. The screening system generates an alert that is reviewed by the compliance team, who must determine whether the match is a true positive (the party is genuinely on the sanctions list) or a false positive (a name match but a different individual).
How do payment businesses manage false positives in sanctions screening?
Sanctions lists contain common names that generate significant false positive alert volumes, common names like "Mohammed Ali" or "Carlos Rodriguez" may match dozens of SDN list entries without the transaction parties actually being sanctioned individuals. Managing false positives requires a combination of technical matching tuning (adjusting match thresholds to reduce obvious false matches), secondary identifier verification (using dates of birth, addresses, and national ID numbers to disambiguate name matches), and human review workflows for borderline cases.
