The Six Key Questions to Ask on Instant Payment and Sanctions Screening:
How is system availability defined?
A 24/7 round-the-clock service year-round, with zero downtime
What is the maximum tolerable response time?
A maximum of 10 seconds, which is extendable to 20 seconds in exceptional circumstances
What does this mean in the context of sanctions screening?
PSPs should periodically, and at least daily, verify whether their PSUs are persons or entities subject to targeted financial restrictive measures, and should no longer apply transaction-based screening in that specific context. However, they must comply with Union law on AML and CFT.
Which data does the sanctions screening check for instant payments?
The sanctions screening checks transaction data, such as IBAN, purpose of use, blocked banks or countries.
What is the difference between screening of standard bank transfers?
The instant payment screening function compares remittance data with sanctions and blacklists and as soon as a “hit” is found, the payment is rejected. Manual clarification, as with a standard bank transfer, is not possible. To keep customer satisfaction high, it becomes even more crucial to reduce false positives via screening of instant payments than with SEPA credit transfers.
What role must an IT system fill in instant payment screening?
Instant payment screening and the need to perform the checking mentioned within 500 milliseconds and no more than a second has a massive impact on the IT infrastructure and requires interface adjustments. The storage of hits and clarifications must also be adapted to the strict time regime and the cache, workflow and GUI all have to be further optimized.