How to choose an OFAC sanctions screening tool

Picking the right tool means weighing accuracy, speed, coverage, integration, pricing, and auditability against your payment flow.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Choose a tool that returns a clear ALLOW or BLOCK decision in one API call, covers the SDN list plus crypto wallets, and logs every check for audit.

Accuracy and coverage first

A screening tool is only as good as its data. Confirm it pulls from the US Treasury SDN list, which currently names 19,218 entries, and that it also checks crypto wallets, since OFAC has listed 947 of them. The 50 Percent Rule matters too: an entity owned 50% or more by a blocked person is itself blocked, so fuzzy name matching alone is not enough.

Speed and integration

For an automated payment flow the check has to finish before the money moves. Look for a single HTTP call that completes in under 100 ms and returns a decision your code can branch on. Confirm it integrates with the tools you already run, whether that is an MCP server installed with pip install sanctions-mcp or protocols such as x402, AP2, and ACP.

Pricing and audit trail

Pricing should scale with your volume. A free tier that allows a handful of checks per day is enough to evaluate, and paid tiers start at $19 per month. Whatever you choose, make sure every result is logged with a timestamp, the counterparty queried, and the ALLOW or BLOCK outcome, because strict liability means you may need that record later.

A quick evaluation checklist

A practical way to compare tools is to score each one on five points: data coverage (SDN names plus crypto wallets), decision speed (under 100 ms), integration fit (MCP, x402, AP2), pricing that scales, and audit logging. Rank the tools against your own payment flow rather than against a generic list of features.