Crypto compliance for brokers who accept crypto deposits

Why broker funding is different from an exchange

The risk lives at the seams of the lifecycle (deposit, conversion, trading, withdrawal) and a processor in the middle does not move the obligation.

Most compliance tooling is built for exchanges and VASPs, firms whose whole business is crypto custody. A broker's lifecycle is different: the deposit arrives in crypto (often via a payment processor), is converted, credited to a trading account as fiat or USD margin, traded on MT5 or similar, and eventually withdrawn, sometimes to a completely different wallet. The risk sits at each of those handovers: third-party funding, pass-through accounts with no real trading, deposits split just under reporting thresholds, withdrawal wallets that never matched the deposit wallet.

Screening the wallet once at deposit is not enough. The obligation runs across the whole funding lifecycle, and it doesn't disappear because a payment processor sits in the middle. Under FATF's reliance framework, your firm keeps responsibility for monitoring even when a licensed third party does the conversion.

What regulators expect

Screen, decide under a written policy, monitor continuously, and keep 5–7 years of records that reconstruct any decision.

Supervisors from FSC Mauritius (under FIAMLA) to CySEC, FSA Seychelles and Labuan FSA expect much the same four things: screen every funding event against sanctions data; decide using a documented, consistently-applied policy; monitor continuously, including re-checking past deposits when lists change (OFAC explicitly recommends lookback); and keep records, typically for 5–7 years, that let you reconstruct any decision on demand.

Small firms most often fall short on the last one. A vendor's screening PDF proves a check ran. It does not show which policy was in force, who approved the exception, or that the record has not been edited since.

Score vendors, platforms or build in-house

Score APIs leave the decision and records to you, and enterprise platforms price out small brokers. KYTGate is the decision-and-evidence layer, with your vendors plugged in.

Per-check screening APIs are cheap and useful, but they hand you a risk score and leave the decision logic, case handling and record-keeping to you. Enterprise analytics platforms cover everything, at contracts that start where a small broker's entire compliance budget ends. Building in-house means owning list updates, policy versioning and audit mechanics forever.

KYTGate is a fourth option: the decision and evidence layer, sold as a product. Official sanctions data and on-chain checks are built in. Your processor's KYT results and any commercial vendor plug in alongside them. Your policy is applied deterministically, and every outcome is recorded as a signed, replayable Decision Receipt. You keep your vendors and can switch them freely.

Where to start

Run any deposit address through the free sanctions check. Then start a sandbox or a plan and watch 30 days of shadow decisions on your own traffic.

The first step takes two minutes and costs nothing. Run any deposit address through our free wallet sanctions check. It screens against OFAC, UK and EU data and reads USDT/USDC freeze status live on-chain. When you're ready to automate the whole lifecycle, start a free sandbox or a plan: new tenants run 30 days in shadow mode, so you see decisions on your own traffic before anything is enforced.