Payment screening (also called transaction screening) checks the parties, banks, countries and free-text fields in a payment message against sanctions lists before the payment is executed, so that a prohibited payment can be held, rejected or blocked rather than discovered afterwards.
Single-snapshot screening at onboarding leaves the firm exposed to every list update made after the customer joined. This guide covers how often to rescreen customers, frequency calibration by risk tier, material-change triggers that should accelerate screening, and what FATF, MAS, FCA and FinCEN actually expect in inspection.
Every regulated firm must screen against sanctions lists — but the six major lists differ materially in scope, update cadence and extraterritorial reach. This guide compares OFAC, UN, EU, UK HMT, MAS and Australia’s DFAT list, and explains how to build a defensible multi-list screening programme that satisfies every applicable regime.
Adverse media screening searches the open and licensed information environment for risk signals about a customer — investigations, prosecutions, regulatory findings, sanctions adjacency, and reputational events. It sits alongside sanctions and PEP screening as a core component of customer due diligence. This guide explains what it covers, where the false-positive problem comes from, and how to design a programme that scales.
