Alkami + Unit21: real-time fraud detection and AML in one platform
A member logs in, changes their phone number, and sends $4,000 to a new payee. It takes about 90 seconds. If the fraud system reviews that activity in a nightly batch, the money is gone before anyone looks.
Digital banking fraud happens inside the session: at login, at a profile change, at the moment a payment goes out. Stopping it takes a decision in that moment, and a record that carries through to investigation and filing.
Today Unit21 joins Alkami as an Alkami Alliance Partner. That gives financial institutions on the Alkami Digital Banking Platform another option for real-time fraud prevention: one that runs fraud detection, AML monitoring, investigations, and FinCEN filing on a single platform.
How real-time fraud detection works inside an Alkami digital banking session
The integration does two things.
- Real-time decisions inside the session. When a member logs in, updates their profile, or moves money, Alkami sends the event to Unit21 over a synchronous API. Unit21 checks it against the rules your team wrote and sends back pass, step-up authentication, or block before the action completes.
- One record from event to filing. Alkami activity lands in the same Unit21 workspace as your core and payment data, linked to a single entity. When a rule fires, the alert goes through case management to a SAR or CTR e-filed directly with FinCEN, with most fields already filled in from the case. With AI Agents, triage, evidence gathering, and the draft narrative are done before an analyst opens the case, and a person reviews every filing before it goes out.
Your team owns the rules. When a new scam pattern shows up, an analyst can build a rule, run it against historical data in validation mode to see who it would have flagged, and publish it the same day. No vendor ticket, no waiting for a release.
Why next-day fraud review no longer holds up
Batch detection was built for money that moved slowly. Faster payment rails, account takeovers, and scams now leave minutes to act, not a day. Nacha's 2026 fraud monitoring rules, phased in through March and June, made risk-based ACH monitoring a current obligation. Examiners keep asking whether a program works, not how many alerts it produces.
Deciding inside the session closes the window. It also means the investigation record starts when the event happens, so there's a clear answer when an examiner asks why a decision was made.
How Kinecta doubled true positives with half the alerts
Kinecta Federal Credit Union runs Unit21 alongside the Alkami Platform. Its team builds, validates, and publishes a rule the same day a new fraud trend appears. Kinecta cut daily alerts from more than 100 to fewer than 50 while catching twice as many true positives. The share of alerts that turned out to be real roughly doubled, from about 20% to 40%.
Kinecta also takes part in Unit21's opt-in Consortium, which shares investigation outcomes across 100+ US institutions. On one weekend, a Consortium hit stopped $70,000 in fraud that would otherwise have gone through.
Getting live on Alkami: what's next and how to start
If you're live on Alkami’s Digital Banking Platform, talk to your Unit21 or Alkami representative today about what this looks like for your institution.
To learn more, see a demo of Unit21 + Alkami in an October 22nd webinar.
Kunal Datta is the Chief Product Officer at Unit21. Prior to Unit21, he led the Product team for Checkout at Fast, and prior to that, led the Product teams responsible for automating aerial wildfire safety inspections at Pacific Gas & Electric.
He has a background leading Product teams using AI to automate processes at regulated entities, as well as financial products, machine learning products, web applications, mobile applications, hardware products, and data products. Kunal is a Fulbright Scholar and studied Civil and Environmental Engineering and Music Science Technology at Stanford University.
