Screen payments in real time, without slowing them down.
Our platform extends its matching and risk-data foundation to real-time payment screening: originators, beneficiaries and counterparties are matched against sanctions and watchlists as the payment moves, with entity resolution applied before a match reaches your review queue.
Every payment carries screening obligations, but a payment held on a false positive is a customer promise broken. Screening has to run inside the payment flow, at the speed the rails demand.
Name-only matching on payment fields holds legitimate transfers, and batch screening discovers a sanctioned party only after settlement, when the options are far worse.
How does BriteBase help with payment screening?
Our platform screens every party in the payment against sanctions and watchlists in real time, applies agentic entity resolution to resolve false matches before they reach review, and routes unresolved matches to review with the evidence attached.

A payment enters the flow with originator, beneficiary and counterparty details.
Each party is matched against sanctions and watchlists in real time.
Entity resolution resolves false matches before they reach your review queue.
Payments with no unresolved match continue through your configured flow.
Unresolved matches route to review with the evidence attached, and your configured process governs the hold.
What is payment screening, and how is it different from transaction monitoring?
Payment screening, also called transaction screening, checks the parties and details in a payment against sanctions lists and watchlists before the funds are released. Transaction monitoring looks for suspicious behaviour across many transactions over time. Most programs need both.
Every party in the message
FATF Recommendation 16 requires originator and beneficiary information to travel with wire transfers. Screening applies to all of it: the ordering customer, the beneficiary, intermediary institutions and free-text fields where a sanctioned name or port can appear.
Decisions before settlement
A sanctions match on a payment usually means holding, rejecting or blocking it. In the US, blocked property must be reported to OFAC within 10 business days. The screening decision has to arrive within the payment window, which is why our engine returns a result in real time.
False-positive holds cost money
Every unnecessary hold delays a customer payment and occupies an analyst. Agentic entity resolution clears near-duplicate and homonym matches before they become holds, so analysts review the payments that carry real exposure.
One matching standard across the lifecycle
Customers screened at onboarding and parties screened on payments should be matched with the same logic and the same lists, so a name cleared in one place is not treated differently in another. See how screening and monitoring divide the work in our guide to transaction monitoring and screening.
What powers the workflow?
Real-time party matching
Originators, beneficiaries and counterparties screened in-flow.
Agentic entity resolution
Resolves false matches before they reach your review queue.
Risk-based routing
Holds follow your configured risk thresholds and process.
Payment audit trail
Every hold and release recorded with evidence.
Benchmark false positives on your own sample.
Results depend on the data and configuration, so test them on yours before you commit.
Your data, your baseline
We benchmark alerts and true matches on a sample of your own records, so you can compare results against your current provider.
Free for 30 days
Agreed volumes and sandbox access. No card, and no automatic move to a paid plan.
No long lock-in
Monthly or annual terms, ended on 30 days’ notice. Your case history and audit trail leave with you.
Frequently asked questions
How does BriteBase screen payments without slowing them down?
Screening runs inside the payment flow rather than as a separate step around it: originators, beneficiaries and counterparties are matched against sanctions and watchlists in real time as the payment moves, and agentic entity resolution resolves false matches before they reach your review queue. The real cost of payment screening is rarely the check itself. It is the false-positive holds, where a legitimate payment sits in a review queue while a customer waits and support tickets accumulate. Clearing name-variant and homonym noise before a hold is placed means fewer legitimate payments sit in a review queue, and the payments that do stop are more likely to carry a genuine risk signal worth a human decision. The alternative approaches both fail in practice: batch screening discovers a sanctioned party only after settlement, and loose matching thresholds trade missed exposure for speed, neither of which survives an examination.
Which parties in a payment are screened?
The originator, the beneficiary and the counterparties in the flow are each matched against sanctions lists spanning OFAC, Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia and APAC regimes, including comprehensively sanctioned geographies, vessels, ports and restricted securities, plus trade restriction lists such as the US BIS lists, the World Bank Listing of Ineligible Firms and Individuals, and the Canada Export Controls List. Screening every party rather than just the customer side matters because exposure in a payment often sits on the far end of the transfer, with a beneficiary or intermediary the paying institution has never onboarded and holds no file on. Because payment screening runs on the same entity-resolution engine and the same data layer as customer and company screening, a party is evaluated against the same breadth of coverage regardless of which side of the payment it appears on, rather than payment fields being matched against a thinner list set than onboarding uses.
What happens when a payment is held?
Each hold arrives with a plain-language rationale and the matching evidence already attached, so the reviewer starts from context rather than reconstructing why the payment stopped. The reviewer works the case in place: the match details, the conflicting evidence and the party history are in one record, and the release or escalation decision is documented as part of the same case rather than in a separate system. Every hold and release is recorded with its evidence and disposition, which is what lets payment screening stand up at examination time, since an examiner reviewing a sample of held payments can see specifically why each one stopped, what the reviewer considered, and why it was released or escalated. False matches cleared by entity resolution are also retained with the conflicting evidence that cleared them, so the record covers what did not stop the payment as well as what did.
See payment screening in action with BriteBase.
See our platform screen a live customer against global sanctions, PEP and adverse media data. Book a demo with our team.
