Sanctions screening in an age of faster payments
Instant settlement leaves little time for manual review. We look at how sanctions and AML controls are adapting to keep pace with faster payment rails without raising false positives.
Faster rails, same controls
Payment rails are getting faster, and the compliance controls sitting on top of them are under pressure to keep up. SWIFT gpi has compressed the time a cross-border payment spends in flight, instant SEPA credit transfers move euros between accounts in seconds, and faster-payment schemes are now the default expectation in domestic markets around the world.
Sanctions and anti-money-laundering screening, historically built around an overnight batch window, increasingly has to run inside that same compressed window — in real time, without becoming the thing that slows the payment back down again.
Speed and control, pulling in opposite directions
That creates a genuine tension rather than a simple technology upgrade. Real-time screening demands low-latency list-matching and fuzzy-name-matching engines that can clear a payment in milliseconds, not minutes.
It demands thresholds tuned carefully enough that the system catches what it needs to without generating a flood of false positives — because a screening engine that escalates too readily simply rebuilds the manual review backlog that instant payments were meant to remove.
And because payments rarely stay within a single institution's four walls, it demands screening practices that stay closely aligned with what correspondent banks further down the chain expect to see.
Reducing duplicated effort across the network
Institutions are not solving this alone. Shared due-diligence infrastructure, such as SWIFT's KYC Registry, lets banks reduce the amount of compliance work that gets repeated bilaterally across every correspondent relationship, freeing capacity to focus on tuning the screening itself.
Much of this work — on latency, on thresholds, on network-wide alignment — remains a work in progress across the industry rather than a solved problem, and institutions are converging on practice gradually rather than all at once.
Run Ventures advises banks and PSPs on exactly this balance between speed and control — tuning screening thresholds, reducing false positives and aligning with correspondent banks' expectations without slowing payments down.