mcp-easycompliance

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for easycompliance – the German SaaS platform for automated sanctions list and PEP screening.

It lets AI agents (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, agent frameworks and other MCP clients) screen business partners against EU/US/HADDEX sanctions lists and PEP lists, and maintain the daily monitoring list of an easycompliance account. The server is a pure consumer of the easycompliance REST API – executed tool calls (screenings, status/hit queries and executed monitoring changes) count towards the account's regular API quota and appear in the account's API log. Rejected requests (e.g. an invalid key) and deletion attempts without a matching entry are not logged.

Tools

| Tool | Kind | Description | |---|---|---| | check_sanctions_list(name, accuracy?) | read-only | One-time screening of a name against the EU/US/HADDEX sanctions lists | | check_pep_list(name, accuracy?) | read-only | One-time screening of a name against the PEP list (politically exposed persons) | | get_hits_last_24h(list) | read-only | Hits produced by the daily monitoring within the last 24 hours | | get_list_status(list) | read-only | Date (dd.mm.yyyy) of the last update of the selected list | | check_and_add_to_monitoring(list, name, ref?, duplicate_by?, accuracy?) | write | Screens the name and adds it to the account's daily monitoring list | | remove_from_monitoring(list, by, value) | write | Removes one matching entry from the daily monitoring list (by name or by reference) |

list is "sanctions" or "pep". Screening results are always structured: hit (boolean), hitCount and hits[] with a percent match score – an empty result (HTTP 204 of the API) is returned as hit: false, never as an error.

Compliance notes

• The tool results are the authoritative source. The tool descriptions instruct the calling model to never soften, filter or omit hits.
• If hit is true, the professional assessment of the match belongs in the easycompliance customer portal (https://kunde.easycompliance.de, Monitoring → Hits) – not in the AI conversation.
• check_and_add_to_monitoring has a persistent side effect (the name is re-screened daily and counts towards the account's monitoring quota); remove_from_monitoring removes monitoring entries. Both are clearly marked as write tools (no readOnlyHint), so MCP clients can require confirmation.
• remove_from_monitoring removes exactly one matching entry per call and is deliberately not marked idempotent: if several monitoring entries share the same name, a retried call removes another one of them. Use by="ref" with unique references to address a specific entry.

Requirements

You need an easycompliance account with API access. Customer service (https://www.easycompliance.de/) provides:

• your API key,
• the sanctions list API URL and the PEP API URL (only needed if your account uses customer-specific URLs – the public defaults are built in).

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables. The MCP server itself never writes the key to a file and never logs it. Note that your MCP client stores the values you configure (including EC_API_KEY, as in the examples below) in its own configuration file, e.g. claude_desktop_config.json – protect that file like a password, and prefer your client's environment-variable or secret-management support where available.

| Variable | Required | Default | Description | |---|---|---|---| | EC_API_KEY | yes (stdio) | – | API key provided by easycompliance customer service | | EC_SANCTIONS_URL | no | https://www.easycompliance.de/easy.api | Sanctions list API endpoint | | EC_PEP_URL | no | https://www.easycompliance.de/pep.api | PEP API endpoint |

Installation

The package runs with Node.js >= 20 and is started via npx mcp-easycompliance (stdio transport).

Claude Desktop

Add the server to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "easycompliance": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-easycompliance"],
      "env": {
        "EC_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add easycompliance --env EC_API_KEY=your-api-key -- npx -y mcp-easycompliance

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or the project's .cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "easycompliance": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "mcp-easycompliance"],
      "env": {
        "EC_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Other MCP clients

Any MCP client that supports the stdio transport can run npx -y mcp-easycompliance with the EC_API_KEY environment variable set.

Remote endpoint (streamable HTTP)

The same package contains a second entry point, mcp-easycompliance-http, which serves the identical tool set over the MCP streamable HTTP transport. It is intended for hosted operation (e.g. https://mcp.easycompliance.de/mcp) so clients can connect without a local installation. It works today with remote clients that can send custom request headers, such as the OpenAI Responses API or MCP SDK clients; ChatGPT custom connectors depend on compatible authentication (OAuth is a planned extension, see below), so ChatGPT app support is in preparation:

• Authentication: the client sends its easycompliance API key in the X-API-Key request header; the server passes it through 1:1 to the REST API on every call. There is no key store, no session state and no persistence in the MCP layer.
• OAuth is currently out of scope (planned as a future extension for connector directories that require it).

Example (Claude Code):

claude mcp add --transport http easycompliance https://mcp.easycompliance.de/mcp --header "X-API-Key: your-api-key"

Operations & security (self-hosting the HTTP endpoint)

Deployment templates (nginx reverse proxy, systemd unit, Dockerfile for containerized operation + step-by-step guide with both variants) are in deploy/:

• The Node process binds to 127.0.0.1 only; TLS and the public hostname are provided by the nginx reverse proxy.
• The server is stateless: each request creates a fresh server instance with the key from the request header; nothing outlives the request.
• The MCP layer logs no names, no screening data and no keys – the API's own log (apilog) is the audit trail for executed calls, which also count towards the account's API quota there.
• GET /healthz returns 200 ok for uptime checks.

Environment variables of the HTTP entry point: MCP_HTTP_HOST (default 127.0.0.1), MCP_HTTP_PORT (default 8765), MCP_HTTP_PATH (default /mcp), plus EC_SANCTIONS_URL/EC_PEP_URL as above. EC_API_KEY is not used in HTTP mode – keys always come from the client request.

API behaviour

The underlying REST API responds with HTTP 200 (JSON result array), 204 (no hit / no entry), 400 (invalid request body), 401 (invalid API key or suspended account), 403 (operation not included in the API plan) or 405 (non-POST). The server normalizes these into structured tool results and clear tool errors; an HTTP 200 without a result array is reported as a transport error and never as a clean "no hit". For get_list_status, an HTTP 204 (no completed list update verifiable yet) and a malformed date are reported as tool errors rather than as an empty status.

Known limitation of the API contract (shared with all API clients, including the n8n community node): for check_and_add_to_monitoring the API reports the screening result without a separate confirmation of the monitoring insertion – a server-side insert failure is logged on the server but not signalled in the HTTP response. Extending the API contract is outside the scope of this consumer package.

Development

npm ci
npm run lint
npm run build
EC_API_KEY=<test-key> npm run livetest        # live harness (stdio logic) against the production API
EC_API_KEY=<test-key> npm run livetest:http   # live harness for the streamable HTTP transport

Resources

• easycompliance MCP integration guide (German)
• easycompliance API documentation (German)
• Model Context Protocol documentation

License

MIT