Payment Screening

Financial institutions are required to ensure they do not make funds or economic resources available to sanctioned individuals, entities, or jurisdictions. In every payment, funds may pass through multiple parties—including beneficiaries, intermediary banks, and payment identifiers such as bank accounts or crypto wallets—all of which must be screened against sanctions lists before funds move.

The challenge is immediate and high-risk: regulatory penalties from sanctions violations, operational strain from false positives, and poor customer experience from delayed or blocked legitimate payments. Traditional screening tools, designed for batch processing or onboarding-only checks, fail to evaluate all participants in a transaction in real time, leaving compliance gaps at the moment money moves.

What is Payment Screening?

Socure's Payment Screening solution enables organizations to prevent sanctioned payments by screening every entity and identifier involved in a transaction in real time.

Socure delivers real-time sanctions decisioning through a single API, allowing organizations to evaluate payments before execution, apply risk-based screening policies, and orchestrate compliance checks across onboarding and payment workflows.

Key features

• Real-time sanctions screening (<200 ms) – Evaluate payments inline before funds move, enabling approve, review, or block decisions without introducing latency.

• Single API request to screen multiple entities– Submit one request to screen all entities in a transaction -- senders, beneficiaries, intermediary banks, financial institutions, and payment identifiers including bank names, BIC / SWIFT, IBANs, and crypto wallet addresses

• Granular orchestration of screening controls– Configure multiple watchlist policies within a single workflow based on entity role, payment route, jurisdiction, and risk thresholds.

• Identity Graph–powered matching – Leverage identity resolution across multiple identifiers to improve match accuracy and reduce false positives compared to name-only screening.

• Unified case management and audit trail – Investigate alerts in a unified case manager with consistent audit logs across onboarding and payment decisions.

• AI-assisted alert investigation – Accelerate case resolution with AI-generated summaries and recommendations.

Key benefits

• Detect sanctioned entities – Enforce compliance at the moment funds move, reducing regulatory risk and avoiding prohibited transactions.

• Lower false positives and investigation burden– Use identity-driven matching and policy-based controls to reduce alert noise and manual review volume.

• Full visibility across payment participants – Screen every entity in a transaction, including intermediary institutions and payment identifiers, not just counterparties.

• Unified compliance operations – Manage onboarding and payment screening within a single platform, eliminating fragmented tools and workflows.

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