PEP Screening API for Onboarding

The Problem This Solves

When you onboard a new counterparty, you need to know whether that person or entity carries elevated risk because of a political role. Politically exposed persons (PEPs) hold or have held public positions that can expose financial institutions to bribery, corruption, and money laundering risk. Their immediate family members and close associates carry related exposure.

Screening for this manually is slow and inconsistent. A relationship manager searching public sources during onboarding may miss a match, record it differently from a colleague, or fail to document why a name was cleared. Adding a programmatic PEP screen to your onboarding flow gives you a repeatable step that runs the same way every time and produces a record you can show an examiner.

What the Capability Does

OilFlow's KYC API includes politically-exposed-person screening. This screening does not run on its own. It sits alongside an eight-list sanctions screen, and both run inside the same seven-step counterparty pipeline. That means a single call against a counterparty puts the subject through sanctions screening and PEP screening as part of one structured process rather than as separate, disconnected checks.

The most important behavior to understand is how the API treats uncertainty. When a signal cannot be verified, the API reports that result as pending. It does not report an unverifiable result as clean. This distinction matters for compliance work: a pending status tells your team that a question remains open and needs human attention, rather than silently passing a counterparty that the system was unable to confirm. A clean result means the screen ran and did not surface a concern. A pending result means the screen could not reach a conclusion you can rely on.

How a Team Would Use It

A compliance team adding PEP screening to onboarding would typically integrate the API at the point where a new counterparty's details are first captured. The onboarding system submits the counterparty to the KYC API, the seven-step pipeline runs, and the response comes back with sanctions and PEP results together.

From there, your workflow handles the outcomes:

• Clean results can continue through onboarding under your normal process.
• Pending results should be routed to a reviewer. Because the API will not pass an unverifiable signal as clean, a pending status is your signal that someone needs to gather more information or make a documented decision before proceeding.
• Matches are handled according to your internal escalation procedures.

To evaluate the API before committing, you can start with the free read-only sandbox key. This lets developers and compliance staff see the request and response shapes and confirm how pending and clean results are represented, without spending anything. When you move to production, pricing is pay-as-you-go from $25 per screen, so you pay per counterparty screened rather than committing to a fixed contract up front.

The Honest Scope: What It Does Not Do

Be clear with your team about the boundaries of this capability.

The API performs screening. It surfaces sanctions and PEP signals and reports them as clean, pending, or matched. It does not make your risk decision for you. Determining whether a confirmed PEP relationship is acceptable, what enhanced due diligence to apply, and whether to onboard the counterparty remain decisions for your compliance team under your own policies.

A pending result is not a clean result and should not be treated as one. The deliberate use of a pending status means the system is telling you it could not verify a signal. Your procedures need to define what happens next when a screen returns pending.

Screening is also a point-in-time activity. A counterparty who is clean at onboarding may become a PEP later, and PEP and sanctions data change over time. This explainer describes the screening capability as provided in the capability brief; it does not describe ongoing monitoring, refresh cadence, or data source detail, because those facts are not part of the brief. Confirm any operational specifics you need directly before relying on them.

This explainer also makes no claim about accuracy rates, false-positive rates, certifications, or usage figures. None of those are stated here because they are not part of the information available to describe.

Relevant Public Regulatory Frameworks

PEP screening connects directly to established public standards.

FATF Recommendation 10 sets out customer due diligence expectations, including identifying and verifying the customer and understanding the nature of the relationship. FATF guidance treats PEPs as a category requiring additional scrutiny because of their potential exposure to corruption risk, which is why PEP identification is a recognized part of a due diligence program.

OFAC administers and enforces US sanctions programs. The eight-list sanctions screen that runs alongside PEP screening in the same pipeline supports the broader obligation to avoid dealing with sanctioned parties. Note that PEP status and sanctions status are separate concepts: a PEP is not necessarily sanctioned, and a sanctioned party is not necessarily a PEP. The pipeline checks both so you are not relying on one as a proxy for the other.

For teams whose onboarding supports trade finance, UCP 600 governs documentary credit practice. It does not set PEP or sanctions screening rules itself, but counterparties brought into trade finance relationships still need to clear your due diligence and sanctions obligations before transactions proceed.

Used within a documented compliance program, a PEP screen at onboarding gives you a consistent, auditable step that supports these frameworks. The screen produces the signal; your program decides what to do with it.