Glossary
Sanctions screening
Sanctions screening is the check of the people and companies a business deals with against the lists of sanctioned persons, entities, vessels and territories published by the EU, the UN, the UK, the US and other authorities, before onboarding and continuously as lists change. Licensed payment businesses must screen their merchants and the people behind them and, where the law requires, the parties to payments; dealing with a listed party is prohibited regardless of amount.
How it is done
Names, dates of birth, addresses and identifiers are matched against the lists with fuzzy matching that catches transliterations and spelling variants; each potential match is reviewed by a person and either cleared as a false positive or escalated; the result and the reasoning are recorded. Lists change often, so existing customers are rescreened on every update.
Where it bites in payments
Merchant onboarding and ownership changes; payouts to new beneficiaries; cross-border transfers; crypto addresses, where screening uses blockchain analytics; and the countries and territories under comprehensive restrictions, which a payment business excludes from its coverage altogether.
On the platform
Tranzify does not screen against sanctions lists itself; it gives the licensed client the merchant and owner records, the payer and beneficiary data of payments and payouts and the routing conditions by country that the client’s screening and exclusion decisions act on, and it keeps the records the client’s audit needs.
Updated: 2026-11-08