The brief
Onboarding volume was up 4× year-on-year. The compliance team was reviewing every applicant manually, and the backlog kept growing — even after two new hires.
Off-the-shelf KYC vendors covered ID checks, but the real time sink was the secondary review: cross-checking employment history, sanctions, and corporate links. Nobody wanted to ship a black-box decision into a regulated workflow.
What we built
- Workflow that pulls every application into a normalised review packet
- Agent runs the secondary review checklist — sanctions, PEP, employment, address
- Source-cited findings written to the case file (no hidden reasoning)
- Human approval gate for every flagged case, every edge case, every exception
- Per-step audit trail with timestamps, sources, and reasoning
- Failure alerting to compliance ops Slack within seconds of an exception
Results
- Median review cycle dropped from 4 days to under 6 hours
- 94% of applications resolved without human intervention
- Zero regulatory re-opens in the first 90 days post-launch
- Compliance team reallocated 60% of their week to high-stakes case work
“The audit trail is what sold us. Every decision the agent makes, we can trace back to the source data. That's the bar we needed for the regulator.”