OFAC Fintech Compliance Glossary Part 1
Core terms for applying OFAC sanctions screening inside financial technology and agent payment products.
TL;DR
TL;DR: Fintech compliance is the set of controls financial technology companies use to meet sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules. Because OFAC enforces strict liability, fintech payment flows must screen counterparties automatically.
What fintech compliance is
Fintech, or financial technology, describes software that delivers payments, lending, and other financial services. Fintech compliance is the discipline of building sanctions screening and related controls directly into those products. Since fintech moves money at machine speed and often without a human reviewer, the controls must be automated. A missed match is not an acceptable trade-off, because a single prohibited payment can trigger penalties starting at $356,000 per violation.
Why it matters for agent payments
Agent payment systems are fintech products with no human in the loop, which raises the stakes on automation. The counterparty must be screened before funds move, every time. sanctionsai.dev is built for this: an API that returns clean or flagged in one HTTP call under 100 ms, backed by 19,218 SDN names and 947 OFAC-listed wallets synced hourly. It plugs into x402, MCP, and frameworks such as LangChain, CrewAI, and the OpenAI Agents SDK.
Terms covered in Part 1
- Fintech: software that delivers financial services.
- Automated control: a compliance check that runs without human review.
- Integration: connecting screening to an existing payment or agent stack.