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ACTICO Payment Screening

Screen payment transactions effectively and efficiently with machine learning to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing. Screen instant payments against sanctions lists within milliseconds.

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Lower costs, reduced risk

ACTICO Icon electric blue bubble rocket for future — Powerful standard solution

With the ACTICO Payment Screening, users benefit from proven, successfully deployed standard software. Current sanctions list content from external providers can be imported via standard interfaces. Configurable standard algorithms handle the checking of payments against sanctions lists.

ACTICO Icon electric blue bubble chart — Flexibly optimizable

ACTICO Payment Screening can be flexibly tailored to customer requirements. Additional checks against internal lists are supported. Performance can be further optimised through configuration and ACTICO Machine Learning.

ACTICO Icon electric blue bubble security — Comprehensive compliance

With ACTICO Payment Screening, institutions ensure implementation and fulfillment of regulatory requirements in payment transactions. It supports compliance with regulations from the EU, Switzerland, and FATF global standards.

Identify risks in payments early

Automated sanctions list checks in payment transactions

The ACTICO Payment Screening software checks incoming and outgoing payments before they are posted. The check compares payments for matches with sanctions lists. Suspicious transactions are stopped and reviewed in time. The Payment Screening module supports compliance with sanctions and embargoes, helping institutions avoid penalties and reputational damage. Through the use of machine learning, even fuzzy matches in payment monitoring can be identified with optimized cost and risk. Payment Screening creates the necessary balance between effectiveness and efficiency in fuzzy matching.

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Identify risky payments and make traceable decisions on their execution

Ex-Ante screening

Payment data is automatically checked against sanctions lists before execution. Unremarkable payments are released automatically. Suspicious payments are held and either released or stopped after clarification.

Fuzzy matching with minimal manual review

Typos, scanning errors, and alternative spellings can lead to deviations in names and terms. But fuzzy matching enables matching with sanctions list entries and machine learning provides an algorithm that still results in very few manual clarifications.

Fast clarifications

Suspicious payments can be captured at a glance thanks to clear visual comparison and clarified in the shortest time through an optimized processing dialogue. In addition, workflows enable efficient processing of high-risk transactions through the four-eyes principle.

Instant Payment Clarification

ACTICO Payment Screening checks payment data against sanctions lists, countries, and keywords. For instant payments, results must be available within 500 milliseconds to 1 second. As soon as a match is found, the payment is stopped. Clarification then takes place outside the instant payment process.

White List / Exceptions

Selected cases for which no match should be generated can be defined using exceptions. This prevents unnecessary matches for regular payments, for example.

External sanctions lists

The application supports processing of common sanctions lists from EU, OFAC, LSEG (World-Check), Dow Jones, LexisNexis, and Info4C.

Internal sanctions lists

Company-specific bank, keyword, country, and name lists can be flexibly managed as internal lists. These are incorporated into the automatic screening.

Screening history

Checked transactions are documented in the screening history. Any exceptions that come up during screening are also documented in the same.

Regulatory requirements

Payment Screening supports implementation of regulations to combat money laundering and financial crime through embargoes and sanctions. In the EU, for example, EU Regulations 2580/2001, 881/2002, 83/2011 and associated implementing regulations apply. In Switzerland, for example, the Embargo Act and associated ordinances apply. Globally, additional regulations and FATF recommendations apply.

Instant Payments sanctions screening

With instant payments, every second counts. Transactions must be executed within 10 seconds, which is why ACTICO Payment Screening completes sanctions list checks in under one second. The Instant Payment Regulation requires that the customer base be checked regularly against sanctions lists, rather than checking each individual transaction. However, compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regulations remains mandatory for instant payments.

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Make transaction screening more efficient

With its business rules approach, ACTICO offers a simple and flexible way to automate decision-making in compliance. Match generation in transaction checks within ACTICO Payment Screening can also be adapted to different needs.

Supervisory authorities are increasingly requiring the use of fuzzy matching instead of exact searches in payment screening. The goal is to detect anomalies even when names in financial transactions are misspelled or intentionally falsified. But what happens when a bank switches to fuzzy search? Switching from exact to fuzzy search often leads to a higher number of false positives. This increase can overwhelm compliance teams, as manual investigations become impractical. This is where machine learning comes into play.

Machine learning lets banks can strike the right balance between risk (effectiveness) and cost (efficiency). The goal is to maximize the detection of risky transactions, minimize false positives, and ease the burden on compliance teams.

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Machine learning improves the matching of customer data in financial transactions with sanctions lists, thereby increasing the number of true matches. This ensures that real risks are not overlooked (reducing the false negative rate).

At the same time, machine learning reduces the number of false positives by avoiding unnecessary matches. This enables banks and financial institutions to deploy their compliance resources more strategically – and focus on what really matters.

The increasing pressure on financial institutions to comply with regulatory requirements led VP Bank Group to modernize its payment screening processes. A system review revealed that the existing solution no longer met the fuzzy matching standards required by today’s regulations.

To accurately identify potential risks without driving up workload and costs, the Liechtenstein-based bank implemented ACTICO’s payment screening software. Integrating machine learning boosted the quality of fuzzy matching improved significantly. At the same time, the solution reduced the workload for compliance and payments teams by 50%.

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For us, it was important that fuzzy matching would increase the quality of hits for incoming and outgoing payments without unnecessarily increasing the number of transactions that had to be checked. We have achieved this goal without overburdening our payments and compliance teams.

Fabian Wälte

Head of Payments and Transaction Services

Recognised throughout the industry.

For many years, ACTICO has been recognised by customers and analysts as a leading provider of Advanced Decision Automation Technology and solutions for Compliance and Credit Risk Management.