Sumsub

Sumsub is one of the providers you can connect for Travel Rule messaging. See Building a Compliance Policy for how Trigger and Outcome work in general, and About Travel Rule for how Travel Rule fits into your compliance policy overall.

This is a premium, opt-in feature that requires an additional purchase. Contact your Customer Success manager for more information.

How it works

A transaction with Sumsub moves through three rule stages, in order:

1. Screening. Decides whether a transaction needs Travel Rule review at all: Screen (continue to the next stage) or Pass (approve immediately, no review).
2. Missing Travel Rule Message. If review is needed but no Travel Rule message exists yet, this stage decides what happens while one is obtained: Wait, Accept anyway, or Reject. You can set different rules based on how long it has been waiting, for example accepting small transactions after 30 minutes but rejecting large ones.
3. Outcome. Once Sumsub returns a result, this stage applies the final action: Accept, Reject, Alert, or continue to Wait if the result is still pending.

Each stage evaluates its rules top to bottom, with a required catch-all default, the same as any other Trigger or Outcome.

If a transaction has multiple destinations, each one is evaluated independently, and the most restrictive result across all of them applies to the transaction as a whole.

A transaction's screening status is one of: Completed, Pending, Bypassed (approved without review, per your Screening rule), or Failed.

Setup

Before you begin, contact your Customer Success manager to enable this feature, and plan your legal entity structure. Most customers only need one legal entity, covering their whole workspace.

Setup happens through the API rather than the Console:

1. Create a legal entity, specifying its scope (your whole workspace, or specific vault accounts) and a discoverability setting: Anonymous (default: counterparties cannot see your entity details, though Fireblocks confirms the address exists), Hidden (nothing disclosed at all), or Discoverable (full details shared).
2. Connect the legal entity to Sumsub. Sumsub supports auto-connect: once you generate an integration ID, you share it with Sumsub and Sumsub sends your credentials to Fireblocks directly, rather than you entering them manually.

Rule configuration for all three stages is not self-service. You fill out a policy template and submit it to Fireblocks Support, who apply it on your behalf. Policy changes should go through your organization's compliance approval process before you submit them.

To update credentials later, submit a ticket to Fireblocks Support.

Processing

The subsections below describe how processing works.

System timeouts

Fireblocks enforces non-configurable limits so a transaction never waits indefinitely: 1.5 hours maximum for outbound transactions, 7 days maximum for incoming ones. When approaching a limit, a Wait rule is skipped rather than holding the transaction past it.

Testing

Start with testnet assets (BTC_TEST, ETH_TEST5, XRP_TEST) before testing with real value.

Monitoring

The Transaction History page in the Console shows the applied policies and rules, Sumsub's responses, and the final verdict with an explanation for each transaction.

FAQ

The questions below are the ones readers ask most often.

What happens if a Travel Rule message is not ready yet?

Your Missing Travel Rule Message rules decide: wait longer, accept the transaction anyway, or reject it. This is separate from what happens once a message does come back, which is governed by your Outcome rules.

What if a transaction has multiple destinations?

Each destination is screened independently. The transaction as a whole gets the most restrictive result of any individual destination.

Developer portal

See Sumsub in the Travel Rule support integration guide, including Sumsub encryption.