OFAC compliance for payment engineering

How payment engineers translate OFAC rules into code, from the screening gate to the audit trail.

TL;DR

TL;DR: Payment engineering turns OFAC rules into a screening gate before every payout, plus a record that proves the check happened.

The gate

The first requirement is a check before funds move. sanctions_check from sanctionsai.dev screens a counterparty in one HTTP call and returns ALLOW or BLOCK in under 100 ms. A clean result lets the payment proceed; a flagged result stops it. The 4-Gate Agent Payment Protocol, SCREEN, SCORE, STOP, STAMP, describes the full sequence a payment pipeline should follow.

The data

A gate is only as good as the list behind it. The API screens against 19,218 SDN names and 947 OFAC-listed crypto wallets across 16 jurisdictions, synced hourly. Payment engineers should prefer live, synced data over a static list checked at deploy time, because OFAC updates the SDN List continuously.

The audit trail

Strict liability means you may need to show the check ran. Log every screening result, including the counterparty, the outcome, and the timestamp, using STAMP from the protocol. That record demonstrates the payment was screened before settlement, which matters if a counterparty is later added to a sanctions list.