The difference between blocking a payment and regretting one

There are two places to put a sanctions check, and the gap between them is the difference between a control and an apology.

After the money moves

The common pattern: the payment settles, a job runs some minutes or hours later, and a hit produces an alert.

Now somebody has to recall money that has already arrived — and very often already moved again. The platform writes a difficult letter. The compliance officer explains to a regulator why a prohibited payment completed. Everyone agrees to review the process.

The check ran. It just ran too late to be a control.

Inside the posting

Here, screening is a pre-commit hook on the ledger posting. It runs before any entry is written.

A hit means the transaction is refused. Not settled and flagged. Not queued for recall. Refused — no entries, no money moved, nothing to recall.

That placement is the entire feature. Everything else is detail.

Lists that are actually current

The official consolidated sources are registered when the platform first starts and refreshed daily.

A list that is eighteen months old is worse than no list, because it produces confidence without protection.

Monitoring is about patterns

Screening catches named parties. Monitoring catches behaviour: velocity, structuring just below a limit, bursts of payments to recipients never seen before, activity on high-risk corridors.

These rules do not refuse payments. They raise alerts — and crucially, an alert becomes a case.

A case has a name on it

This is the part that separates a compliance function from a pile of flags.

Every alert becomes a case carrying the decision, the reviewer and the reasoning. Somebody looked at this. They decided this. Here is why.

Months later, when a regulator or a partner asks about a particular customer, the answer is a file rather than an archaeology project. And because the decision was recorded with reasoning, it can be revisited when circumstances change, rather than leaving a customer under a silent flag nobody remembers setting.

Two quieter controls

A new beneficiary can require a step-up and a cooling-off before a large amount moves to it. Most account-takeover losses go to an address added minutes earlier; a short delay on first use removes most of that value.

Settlement destination changes are protected, separate from ordinary profile edits — because redirecting a business’s income is the single most valuable thing an attacker can do inside an account.

What it costs

Nothing. This is a condition of operating, not an upsell.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• Screening is a pre-commit hook on the ledger posting: the check happens before entries are written, not after they settle.
• Official consolidated sanctions sources are registered on first start and refreshed daily.
• Monitoring produces cases, not just flags; a case carries the decision, the reviewer and the reasoning.
• A beneficiary added for the first time can require a step-up and a cooling-off before a large amount moves to it.
• Settlement destination changes are a protected action, separate from ordinary profile edits.

What it costs

Not charged separately. It is a condition of operating, not an upsell.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Risk and compliance on the features page.

Read next

• Identity and tiers — Start with a phone. Grow into the limits.
• The ledger — Books that cannot be quietly edited.
• E-money and safeguarding — Every balance is backed, by construction.