4 ms·

1. You have the option of not serving some countries. That is the most obvious one. 2. Ask the question to your payment processor on how they handle this. 3.

by vivegi 4y ago

1. You have the option of not serving some countries. That is the most obvious one. 2. Ask the question to your payment processor on how they handle this. 3. If you (or your b2b clients) are in a regulated industry (for eg: US Healthcare or FinTech) and your employees or contractors handle Protected Health Information (PHI)/Personally Identifiable Information (PII), you may need to run every one of those employee's or contractor's information against the sanctions list (for the US this includes Federal and state lists) on a monthly basis. There are many companies that provide this as a service for a fee. (Ethico - formerly ComplianceLine is a company serving the healthcare industry for sanctions checks for US. https://ethico.com/ https://ethico.com/)

company_xyz 4y ago
>1. You have the option of not serving some countries. That is the most obvious one. A big problem here is that people from SDN lists are located in many including such countries as Germany, US and UK. Search for example here: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/ https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/ Enter United States, United Kingdom, or Germany.
- vivegi 4y ago
  Agreed. What I mentioned was, if you were a US market focused SaaS you might not have to worry about UK or Germany etc., and restrict customers (and vendors) from those locations if you decided on your serviceable market as US geography only. I understand your case might not be that. But for a startup starting from 0 that is an option (i.e., ignoring non-US markets) and utilizing a US centric sanctions check service. If you are expecting to flip a switch to turn it global, it may not work. In practice, you have to work with service providers in each geography (or a global service provider -- I vaguely recall a Thomson Reuters division offering a service, but it was quite expensive -- this info is from several years ago).

by vivegi 4y ago

company_xyz 4y ago

>1. You have the option of not serving some countries. That is the most obvious one. A big problem here is that people from SDN lists are located in many including such countries as Germany, US and UK. Search for example here: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/ https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/ Enter United States, United Kingdom, or Germany.

vivegi 4y ago
Agreed. What I mentioned was, if you were a US market focused SaaS you might not have to worry about UK or Germany etc., and restrict customers (and vendors) from those locations if you decided on your serviceable market as US geography only. I understand your case might not be that. But for a startup starting from 0 that is an option (i.e., ignoring non-US markets) and utilizing a US centric sanctions check service. If you are expecting to flip a switch to turn it global, it may not work. In practice, you have to work with service providers in each geography (or a global service provider -- I vaguely recall a Thomson Reuters division offering a service, but it was quite expensive -- this info is from several years ago).