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Payment Screening

Screen global payments against the freshest sanctions intelligence on the market

Intercept suspicious payments instantly, and give your team the clear, contextual data needed to make fast, confident decisions.

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Catch sanctions risk before money moves

Every held payment carries two costs: a customer left waiting on money that should have arrived, and a compliance team facing the alert volume and regulatory exposure that follow.

Payment Screening is ComplyAdvantage’s real-time transaction screening capability, built natively into the Mesh platform. It automatically screens payments – including sender, receiver, and intermediary banks, BIC codes (bank and remittance payments), and reference text – against global sanctions lists, enabling firms to block or flag high-risk transactions before they are processed. Customers can also use their own custom lists for screening.

Real-time detection, real-time data

Catch sanctions risk on data that’s updated in minutes.

  • Real-time detection: Name screening completes at low latency, fast enough to sit in the transaction authorization flow.
  • Real-time data: Critical sanctions lists are refreshed within minutes of publication, so you screen against today’s regulatory landscape, not last night’s batch.
  • End-to-end data ownership: ComplyAdvantage controls the full data lifecycle from source to alert, which is what makes minutes-to-screen possible.
  • Predictable at peak: The same low latency holds under instant-payment volumes, so payment screening doesn’t slow when traffic spikes.

Your screening, your rules

Update your screening policy as fast as the risk and the regulations change.

  • Adjustable thresholds: Tune screening sensitivity for each sanction list and transaction attribute. Whether you want to empower the compliance team to self-serve via our Mesh interface or integrate via API, we’ve got you covered.
  • Manage your own lists: Build, update, and retire client-managed blocklists from the same interface, so compliance teams can respond to internal risk signals as fast as they appear.
  • Configuration audit trail: Every change to a screening configuration is recorded with the user, timestamp, and availability of the prior version, so reviewers and regulators can see exactly what changed and when.
  • Day-one compliance: Adjust screening for new OFAC, HM Treasury, MAS, or other regulator updates the same day they’re announced, not weeks later when an engineering release ships.

Case management built for the analyst’s screen

Hold, review, and resolve every alert in one place.

  • Hold-and-review interception: Suspicious payments are intercepted and held for analyst review before they’re processed, with full case context attached.
  • Prioritized single case view: Every alert related to a payment surfaces on one joint screen, allowing holistic reviews of the involved parties, reference text, and/or BIC hits and enabling the most efficient workflows to drive transaction outcome decisions (release or reject).
  • Complete customer context: If a customer triggers the creation of multiple cases (across one or more Mesh risk applications), analysts can quickly get an overview, check the customer risk rating, and decide without hunting across systems.
  • Case-level audit trail: Every case update is recorded, including notes, escalations, and decision rationale, so audit prep is a query, not a project.

More than a point solution: The Mesh advantage

One unified compliance engine that grows with your business.

  • Single source of customer data: Customer Screening, Ongoing Monitoring, Transaction Monitoring, and Payment Screening share the same underlying data, so every interaction feeds into one risk profile and analysts see the same view across products.
  • Proprietary financial crime intelligence: ComplyAdvantage owns the data powering every decision, so accuracy and freshness don’t depend on third-party vendors.
  • Built-in governance: Every screening decision is backed by clear reasoning and a full audit trail, so your team can defend its choices to regulators without separate documentation work.
  • One deployment, four risk applications: API and pre-built integrations connect Mesh into your existing systems once, then Customer Screening, Ongoing Monitoring, Transaction Monitoring, and Payment Screening are all available without separate work.

Payment Screening FAQ

SWIFT, Faster payments, Chaps, BACS, IMPS, or immediate payment service.

Our global list coverage can be updated in minutes. You can detect sanctioned entities within one hour of updates from major lists, including OFAC SDN, OFAC Consolidated, UN Consolidated, EU Consolidated, and HMT.

Our solution can screen fields, including counterparty name screening, Customer name screening, Institution name screening, BIC screening, and Reference text screening.

Yes, any number of intermediaries involved in a particular transaction can be configured as long they fit into our traditional schema. Intermediary names can be screened against ComplyAdvantage sanctions data. BICs (Banking identifier code), if provided, can be screened against sanctions lists, too.

Custom lists of individuals or legal entities can be configured, and screening can be done against those lists.

Our APIs are easy to integrate and are supported by extensive documentation available through our platform. Clients have been able to implement in as little as 2-4 weeks.

Interested in learning more?

Eliminate the guesswork by screening every payment against sanctions data that’s updated in minutes, not hours. Give your team the power to make instant, decisive, and correct calls on every transaction.

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Category-leading AML solutions

Our customers and financial services analysts all rate us as a category leader quarter after quarter.