Services · compliance-screening

Reflex

Amboss's risk and compliance layer for Lightning — screen channel peers, invoices, and addresses against sanctions lists, monitor payments continuously, and generate compliance reports through one API.

What it is

Reflex is Amboss’s risk and compliance layer for Lightning operations. Amboss describes it as letting a business “incorporate your risk policies directly into your payment operations”: it screens channel peers, watches payments over time, and produces compliance reports, through an API or a dashboard.

The documented capabilities are sanctions and IP screening (checking channel peers by IP address and funding source against sanctions lists), OFAC channel compliance (screening channels against OFAC-sanctioned Bitcoin addresses, with automated alerts and configurable risk policies), continuous monitoring of historical payments and peers against criteria you set, automated workflows that run checks on a node, an invoice, or a Lightning address, manual research into any node on the network, and deterministic reports — reports built so the same inputs give the same answer, which is what makes them usable as evidence.

Amboss states the intended users are node operators and enterprises. The three documented checks are the shape of the product: check a Lightning node, check a Lightning invoice, check a Lightning address.

When to use it

• A business moving money over Lightning has a compliance obligation and needs peer, invoice, or address screening it can run automatically rather than by hand.
• You want alerts on your own channels when a peer or a funding source matches a sanctions list.
• You need repeatable reports that show a policy was applied consistently.

Dependencies

An Amboss account and API key, plus whatever you are screening — a node, an invoice, or a Lightning address. Reflex checks a target; it does not operate one for you, so no node of your own is required simply to run a check. Pricing is volume-tiered per workflow, and Amboss states there is no approval process to start. The settlement currency is not documented, so this card does not claim one — if you need to pay in sats, confirm it with Amboss first rather than assuming a Lightning company bills in bitcoin.

Quick start

Create an API key in your Amboss account, then follow the “First compliance check” walkthrough at docs.amboss.tech/reflex to run a workflow against a node, an invoice, or a Lightning address. The API reference and webhook-payload verification are documented in the same place.

Gotchas

• It screens; it does not automate a node. Reflex answers “is this counterparty a risk under my policy” — it is not node management, routing automation, or liquidity tooling.
• An older Amboss doc site still describes a different Reflex. amboss.space/reflex/docs/api-docs still resolves and still documents a node-automation API (Graph, Invoices, Workflows, Pathfinding, Runs). The current product is documented at docs.amboss.tech/reflex; treat the older pages as legacy and confirm anything you rely on against the current docs.
• Screening depends on lists and heuristics you do not control. Sanctions matching by IP address and funding source produces both misses and false matches, and a match is an input to your policy rather than a verdict. Whether an alert blocks a payment is a decision you configure.
• Using it puts a third party in the path of who you transact with. That is the point of the product, and it is worth stating plainly: screening decisions are made against data Amboss holds and lists Amboss ingests.