Payment Screening

Hawk's Payment Screening solution helps you catch sanctioned and high-risk activity at the moment a payment moves, without slowing legitimate transactions down. It screens across every payment rail through a single API. It combines detection AI with agentic AI, so you can act on risk with speed and precision.

Real-time detection, built for payment volume Every payment is screened in real time, with response times below 250ms at p99.5 latency. You can hold, release, or block a transaction based on the result, all through one API regardless of rail. This means you don't need a separate integration or a separate screening license for each payment type you support.

Precision that respects limited data Payment messages often carry far less context than a customer profile: sometimes just a name. This data gap is what drives high false positive volumes at many institutions. Hawk's contextual AI addresses this directly. It infers missing attributes, like a counterparty's likely gender or whether a name belongs to a person or an organization. This lets you resolve ambiguous hits with confidence, rather than escalating every uncertain match. You also configure fuzzy matching settings rule by rule, driving precision by choosing how Hawk treats extra tokens, phonetic variations, transliteration, and other naming differences.

Proven results In an independent SWIFT test, a tier 1 European bank compared Hawk against its incumbent screening provider, with rules tuned over more than a decade. Hawk delivered 8 percentage points more sanctions risk caught, alongside 27 percentage points less noise. A cross-border payments provider handling hundreds of payment types reduced transactions wrongfully rejected for sanctions by 55%, cutting customer friction while maintaining compliance.

Flexible list management You can subscribe to pre-built lists from major data providers, including sanctions and dual-use goods sources, or build and maintain your own. You can create sublists with distinct rule logic and matching settings for different jurisdictions or risk segments. Past decision recall means you're not asked to review the same unchanged hit twice.

Agentic AI for faster disposition Hawk's Screening Review Agent extends this precision into the investigation itself. It can research a hit across public and internal sources, compiling context that would otherwise take an analyst hours to gather. Based on your policies, it can recommend a disposition or complete one for review. You control its level of autonomy, and a human stays in the loop wherever you want oversight. Every recommendation includes a confidence score, cited sources, and a chain-of-thought view, so nothing operates as a black box.

Built for scale Hawk's screening technology run natively on the Hawk platform. You can deploy via SaaS, VPC, or on-premise cloud. This lets you upgrade screening precision immediately, without a disruptive, multi-year migration.