Trade Compliance API Across 235 Jurisdictions

The problem this solves

Physical-commodity trade rules are fragmented. Whether a product can move between two jurisdictions, what payment terms are permitted, which licences a counterparty needs, and whether a routing path crosses a sanctioned node are all questions that vary by jurisdiction and change over time. Teams typically answer these questions by stitching together internal spreadsheets, legal memos, and manual lookups. That approach is slow, hard to audit, and difficult to wire into a transaction system that needs an answer before a deal is booked.

The OilFlow Regulatory Matrix API is built to answer those questions programmatically, so a tradability or licence check can run inside your own workflow instead of living in a static document.

What the capability does

The Regulatory Matrix API encodes physical-commodity trade rules for 235 jurisdictions. It covers four areas:

• Product tradability. Whether a given physical commodity can be traded in or between the jurisdictions you query.
• Payment-term constraints. Rules that govern permitted payment terms for a trade in a given jurisdiction.
• Licence requirements. The licence conditions that apply to a product or transaction by jurisdiction.
• Sanctions-aware routing. Routing logic that accounts for sanctions exposure across the path of a trade.

These are the capabilities described in the product brief. The API exposes them so you can query rules by jurisdiction and product rather than maintaining the rule logic yourself.

How a team would use it

A developer integrating the API would typically call it at the point where a trade or counterparty needs to be checked against jurisdiction rules. Common integration points include:

• Pre-trade screening. Before a deal is booked, query whether the product is tradable across the relevant jurisdictions and surface any licence requirements to the desk or the relationship manager.
• Payment-term validation. Check proposed payment terms against the jurisdiction constraints returned by the API, so a non-permitted term is flagged before contract execution.
• Routing checks. Run a proposed route through the sanctions-aware routing capability to identify exposure along the path.
• Compliance review support. Give compliance officers a consistent, queryable source for the rule checks that feed their review, rather than a set of disconnected manual lookups.

Getting started does not require a sales conversation. The product is self-serve from $99 per month, and a free read-only sandbox key is available with no card. The sandbox key lets a developer evaluate request and response formats and confirm that the data fits the workflow before committing to a paid plan. Because the sandbox is read-only, it is intended for evaluation rather than production write operations.

Honest scope: what it does not do

The API encodes rules for tradability, payment terms, licences, and sanctions-aware routing. It is a source of encoded rule data and routing logic. It is not a substitute for your own compliance program, your legal review, or a regulator's determination. Specifically:

• It does not make the booking, licensing, or sanctions decision for you. The output supports a decision that your team and your controls are responsible for.
• It does not represent legal advice. A licence requirement returned by the API still needs to be applied in context by people qualified to do so.
• Beyond the four capability areas listed above, this explainer does not claim functionality that is not in the product brief. If your workflow depends on a function not described here, confirm it directly before relying on it.
• We are not stating accuracy rates, false-positive rates, processing volumes, customer counts, or certification status in this document, because those figures are not part of the capability information provided. Evaluate the data against your own requirements using the sandbox.

The responsible way to use the API is as one input into a controlled process, with human review and your existing policies sitting around it.

The public regulatory frameworks in scope

The rule areas the API addresses map to well-established public frameworks that compliance teams already work within:

• FATF Recommendation 10 (Customer Due Diligence). The Financial Action Task Force standard requires firms to identify and verify counterparties and to understand the nature of a business relationship. Tradability and licence checks support the broader due-diligence obligations that Recommendation 10 sets out, but they do not replace the customer due-diligence process itself.
• OFAC sanctions. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control administers sanctions programs that restrict dealings with designated parties, jurisdictions, and routes. The sanctions-aware routing capability is designed to help surface exposure relevant to obligations like these. You remain responsible for screening against the applicable sanctions lists and for your firm's sanctions compliance posture.
• UCP 600. The Uniform Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits, published by the ICC, governs the operation of documentary credits commonly used in trade finance. Payment-term constraints intersect with the documentary and credit conventions that UCP 600 standardizes.

These frameworks define the obligations. The API provides encoded rule data and routing logic that can feed the checks your team performs against those obligations.

Next step

Start with the free read-only sandbox key, with no card required, and test the request and response formats against a few of your own jurisdiction and product scenarios. When the data fits your workflow, the self-serve plan begins at $99 per month.