Screening Regulations

Screening Payments Going To the United States and Canada

In compliance with the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and with the Canadian Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), payments destined to the United States and payments destined to Canada originating from a foreign country are screened against OFAC’s and OSFI’s sanction lists. Your payments will be screened prior to processing, if you are:

  • Authorized to send payments to the US
  • The Cross Border indicator on your profile has been set to “Y”
  • Your control account for the funding of these payments is in Canada
  • The compliance designation indicator on your profile has been set to “Foreign”

Upon receipt of your input file, regardless of the due dates, all valid payments, pre-notes and payments with warnings (“W”) destined to the United States and payments destined to Canada classified as foreign will be stored in our database and sent for screening in the first available filtering file. The following types of payments will not be sent for screening:

  • “T” level errors, until corrected
  • “In Excess” payments until the status have changed to valid
  • Payments from a blocked file until the file has been unblocked
  • Domestic US Payments
  • If you have authorization to send domestic payments to the United States, and your control account for the funding of these payments is in the US, then these payments will not be screened.
    • Payments set up under Internal RBC Applications
    • Returned Payments, Dishonoured Returns, Contested Dishonoured Returns and Pending Reversals Payments

Payments that: were added or changed, have pre-notes, warnings, or have a correction to a “T” level error through RBC Express will be sent for screening. Changes made to an outstanding valid payment, and if such payment has been screened and is not suspended, will be sent for screening again if the following fields on the payment are changed:

  • Client Short Name Field
  • Customer Name Field
  • Remittance Addenda Record
  • Addressing Information on the Originator or Recipient Addenda Records

Your payments will be released for processing when they successfully pass the screening process. Any payments that do not pass successfully will be given a status of Suspended. A Suspended payment cannot be changed or deleted through the RBC Express ACH Payment Manager until it has been cleared; this function can only be performed by the Cash Management Client Support Centre.

Screening Schedule of Foreign Currency Payments

Screening for ACH Direct Deposits Clients Set Up as Daily Limit or Prefunding