March 26, 2026

Socure launches real-time payment screening to modernize financial compliance

A growing gap between how payments move — and how they’re screened

Payment infrastructure has evolved toward speed, scale, and always-on availability. Sanctions screening infrastructure largely hasn’t.

Many organizations today are still using screening solutions that require multiple payment screening calls for a single transaction — one for the sender, one for the beneficiary, another for the intermediary bank. Each returns separately. Policies get applied in pieces. And what should be a real-time experience starts to break apart behind the scenes.

The result is a growing operational and compliance challenge:

• Increased latency in payment processing
• Elevated false positive rates and manual review volumes
• Limited visibility into the full transaction context

The industry commonly has multiple distinct solutions for watchlist screening at onboarding, payment screening, and ongoing monitoring. This can result in duplicate screens as each user interaction over the course of the user journey is seen in isolation.

Fragmented screening can make it difficult to demonstrate consistent, risk-based decisioning — a core expectation across global regulatory frameworks. Over time, teams start spending significant time just managing the gaps between systems.

To address this, Socure today announced the launch of Payment Screening, extending RiskOS bringing real-time sanctions and watchlist screening directly into the payment flow, and unifying watchlist screening and monitoring across the lifecycle of a user.

Bringing screening into a single, real-time decision

Socure Payment Screening enables organizations to evaluate transactions for sanctions risk holistically through a single, orchestrated API call — including senders, beneficiaries, intermediary banks, and payment identifiers like BICs and blockchain addresses — all in real time.

Supporting a risk-based and regulator-aligned framework

Speed alone doesn’t solve the problem. Precision does.

With Socure, organizations can define payment screening policies at a granular level — by corridor, jurisdiction, industry, entity type, product line, input data availability, or payment path. High-risk routes can be evaluated with more stringent screening controls, while established, lower-risk corridors can move with less friction. This reduces unnecessary alerts without weakening compliance posture.

Behind the scenes, entity resolution connects each participant in a transaction and matched identity on a watchlist to a persistent identity within the Global Identity Graph. Socure’s Entity Correlation Score surfaces matches based on identity similarities rather than just name matches. That context allows teams to reduce false positive alerts — making it easier to distinguish legitimate risk.

To see what that changes in practice, consider a common scenario.

A customer in London sends a $5,000 transfer to a new recipient in Singapore. Under a legacy setup, that single payment sets off a chain of separate checks — each one looking at a different piece of the transaction, without much awareness of the others.

The sender’s name produces a partial match. On its own, it’s inconclusive. But without broader context, the system leans conservative.

• The payment is flagged.
• Funds are held.
• A legitimate customer is left waiting.

Now, with Socure’s Payment Screening, that same transaction is evaluated as a whole.

The system recognizes the sender as a known, low-risk identity. At the same time, it applies the appropriate screening policy for this specific payment corridor — without slowing down the entire flow.

A false positive is avoided, the payment proceeds, and the compliance team avoids having to step in.

The result is simpler to operate, easier to scale, and far more aligned with how modern payments actually work.

From screening as a checkpoint to screening as infrastructure

As payment ecosystems continue to evolve, compliance capabilities must operate within the transaction flow, in real time, with full context.

Socure Payment Screening enables organizations to:

• Improve consistency in sanctions and watchlist screening across the user journey and across jurisdictions
• Reduce unnecessary operational burden driven by low-quality alerts
• Strengthen auditability and regulatory defensibility
• Adapt more effectively to changing payment patterns and regulatory expectations

Real-time payments are a standard expectation. With Payment Screening, Socure helps compliance teams keep pace — with the same speed, consistency, and control.

Mark Bahl

Mark Bahl is a Product Marketing Manager at Socure, where he leads Go-To-Market strategy for the Socure Compliance portfolio. Mark works cross-functionally to drive successful product launches, produce strategic industry insights, and craft impactful thought leadership and enablement content. Deeply passionate about the compliance and risk space, Mark is committed to advancing innovation and helping organizations build trust, ensure transparency, and achieve regulatory excellence.