Compliance, Built In: How VizyPay Runs OFAC Screening on Every Account, Every Day
Every merchant and every principal VizyPay boards has to be screened against the U.S. Treasury's sanctions list. We don't outsource that check. We run it on VEXIS, the same platform underneath VizyPay itself, every day, on our own book of business, before it's ever offered to anyone else.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth merchant we boarded, a job showed up that nobody mentioned when we started this company. It isn't optional, and it isn't a one-time check. The obligation runs for the life of the account.
What actually gets checked
Every merchant we board gets screened by legal name, DBA, and business address. Every owner and controller behind that merchant gets screened too, by name and address. Those checks run against multiple federal lists at once, not just one, because a name can be clean on one list and flagged on another.
This isn't a one-time check at signup. Lists get updated constantly, so an account that cleared six months ago gets re-screened every time the underlying list changes, not just when we remember to look.
Why this becomes your job on day one
A sales organization moving into payments usually doesn't know this obligation exists until someone tells them, often the hard way. The moment you're boarding merchants, you're the one responsible for catching a match, documenting the review, and keeping records for years, not months. That's a federal compliance function sitting inside what used to be a sales process.
What runs automatically, and what still needs a human
Most screenings clear on their own. A name comes back with no match against any list, and the system closes it out without anyone touching it.
The ones that don't clear are where it matters. A name can score close enough to a real entry on a watchlist that the system can't wave it through automatically, close spellings, shared last names, common first names. Those go to a human reviewer, because a compliance decision like that shouldn't be made by a threshold alone.
We've had to tune this. A name-matching system that's too loose drowns a reviewer in false alarms; too strict, and it misses what it's supposed to catch. Getting that balance right took watching real results over time, not guessing once and moving on.
Why this shows up the same way everywhere
This runs the same whether the account came in through ISO, where we're boarding merchants under our own brand, Connect, where a partner's software is boarding them, or Direct, where a business signs up on its own. The screening itself doesn't change. What changes is who's looking at the dashboard.
The takeaway
Selling payments means inheriting a compliance obligation most sales organizations never see coming. We didn't build this feature to sell it. We built it because we needed it to run our own company honestly, and it's stayed one of the more unglamorous, necessary parts of the platform since.
The engine behind VizyPay. Now yours.
We run our own payments company on VEXIS every day. Sales organizations go first. Get on the list and be first through the door.