Inside Unit21’s AI Suite: Building the Future of Compliance and Fraud Prevention

The future of fighting financial crime belongs to those who are built for it. At Unit21, we are not adapting to AI – we are built on it. As fraudsters embrace advanced technologies to scale their attacks, we believe the only effective response is an AI-first approach that empowers risk teams to move faster, act smarter, and make decisions with confidence.

‍

Our AI Suite is the result of this philosophy. It is not a bolt-on feature or an incremental upgrade. It is a reimagined infrastructure where artificial intelligence drives every stage of the risk lifecycle, from real-time detection to automated investigations. The result is a new standard for how compliance and fraud teams can operate: efficient, adaptive, and precise.

‍

The Challenge Facing Risk Teams Today

‍

Fraud is no longer a series of isolated incidents. It is a constant, scaling threat. In 2024, over $12.5 billion was lost to fraud, with 79% of organizations reporting payments-related attacks. Scam-related incidents increased by 56%, and fraudsters are now using AI to execute faster, more targeted schemes. 

‍

Financial institutions and fintechs are feeling the pressure, reporting a sharp rise in attempted fraud and growing complexity in compliance obligations. At the same time, risk teams are drowning in false positives. The industry average sits above 90%, meaning the vast majority of alerts are noise. 

‍

This not only wastes time and resources but also delays investigations and increases the risk of missing real threats. Compliance costs are climbing, workloads are intensifying, and the manual effort required to keep up is becoming unsustainable.

‍

Organizations need a solution that can do more than just manage risk. They need a system that can evolve with it.

‍

How AI in Financial Services Redefines Possibilities

‍

AI is transforming how financial institutions, whether banks, credit unions, fintechs, or crypto platforms, approach risk management and compliance. No longer limited to automating manual tasks, the next phase of AI emphasizes precision, contextual intelligence, and analyst trust.

‍

Efficiency alone isn’t enough. Systems must now generate accurate, reliable insights, provide decision-ready context, and enable seamless collaboration with human judgment. This evolution allows risk and compliance teams to act faster and smarter without compromising control.

‍

From Friction to Frequency

‍

In the past, improving compliance processes often meant reducing user friction, simplifying onboarding, streamlining approvals, and removing unnecessary steps. While that still matters, the pressing challenge now is managing frequency: the unrelenting pace of alerts, transactions, and edge cases that demand round-the-clock attention.

‍

AI helps financial institutions move beyond manual interventions. It eliminates repetitive work, detects subtle patterns, and proactively recommends actions, empowering teams to make decisions quickly and confidently, without defaulting to conservative slowdowns.

‍

Solving Gray-Zone Cases

‍

The toughest challenges often live in the gray zone, cases that are ambiguous or intentionally obfuscated. Historically, resolving these required cautious, time-consuming human review.

‍

AI shortens that window from days to minutes. It offers explainable recommendations while keeping analysts in control, allowing institutions to minimize risk without disrupting operational agility.

‍

Compliance as a Growth Engine

‍

AI helps compliance evolve from a cost center to a strategic growth enabler. By automating signal analysis and streamlining case resolution, institutions can approve legitimate activity faster, reduce friction for trustworthy customers, and focus efforts on emerging threats, fueling safe, scalable growth.

‍

Unit21’s AI Suite: Redefining Fraud and AML

‍

Unit21’s AI Suite is purpose-built to meet the demands of modern risk teams. As an AI-first platform, it does not just add intelligence to existing workflows. It redefines how those workflows operate. Every component is designed to reduce manual effort, increase accuracy, and adapt to emerging fraud patterns.

‍

From alert generation to case resolution, AI is in the driver’s seat, helping teams make faster, more confident decisions. The platform delivers high-impact automation where it matters most while keeping human analysts focused on the exceptions that truly require their expertise.

‍

Key Features and Innovations in Unit21’s AI Suite

‍

Unit21’s AI Suite is engineered to provide end-to-end intelligence and automation for fraud and AML operations. Here are some of the key innovations that make it a game-changer:

• Smarter Rule Tuning

‍

The AI Suite continuously analyzes performance data and suggests updated detection rules your team can review and approve. This ensures that rules stay effective without constant manual reconfiguration, allowing teams to keep pace with rapidly evolving threats.

• Automated Narratives

‍

AI generates clear, audit-ready narratives in seconds, helping investigators accelerate their workflows and improve the consistency of regulatory filings such as SARs. Analysts can now spend less time drafting and more time interpreting insights.

• Specialized AI Agents

‍

Each AI agent is trained to target specific threats, including check fraud, account takeover, elder abuse, sanctions violations,  adverse media, and many more.  Each agent can be further fine-tuned to an institution’s risk profile, delivering specialized insights without adding operational overhead.

• Noise Reduction at Scale

‍

With a 93% reduction in false positives, teams can shift their focus from sifting through noise to solving real threats. Analysts get cleaner queues and fewer distractions.

• Trusted Automation

‍

AI reviews the majority of alerts, allowing teams to bulk-accept recommendations for false positives while keeping humans in the loop at every stage. This flexible approach integrates seamlessly with quality assurance and quality control processes, boosting accuracy, speeding investigations, and cutting handling time.

These features are not separate tools. They work together as part of a unified platform, designed to adapt and scale with your organization.

‍

Unit21’s Custom AI Agents in Fraud and AML Programs

‍

Unit21’s custom AI agents represent the next evolution in compliance technology, designed to automate, configure, and deploy AI-driven workflows without any coding. 

‍

By integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with traditional machine learning systems, these agents combine pattern detection, contextual reasoning, and narrative summarization to provide end-to-end support across both AML and fraud operations.

‍

Leveraging Top-Tier LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

‍

Our custom AI agents leverage leading LLMs, including OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Meta LLaMA, and xAI Grok. With Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), each agent can access relevant datasets before generating outputs, effectively mimicking the reasoning process of a human investigator. 

‍

This enables faster, more accurate, and context-aware decision-making across complex compliance workflows.

‍

Responsible AI: Accuracy + Oversight = Trust

‍

At Unit21, responsible AI is built on the principle: accuracy + oversight = trust. Every action performed by an agent is logged, traced, and evaluated. We employ a dual-review system, including LLM-as-a-judge oversight, to ensure outputs meet rigorous accuracy and compliance standards. 

‍

Analysts remain in control and can intervene, verify, or edit AI outputs, striking the right balance between automation and accountability.

‍

AML and Fraud Agents for Targeted Compliance

Unit21 AI Agents are purpose-built to address both AML and fraud use cases:

• ‍AML Agents: 314(a), EDD, Sanctions, Adverse Media, Transaction Monitoring‍
• Fraud Agents: Elder Abuse, Account Takeover, ACH Fraud, Check Fraud

‍

Each agent is fully auditable and customizable, and integrates human-in-the-loop oversight through a two-tiered quality review system. This approach ensures responsible automation while maintaining full transparency, giving compliance teams the confidence to scale operations without sacrificing control or regulatory accountability.

‍

Impact Metrics of Unit21’s AI Suite

‍

The results speak for themselves. Unit21’s AI Suite is already delivering measurable impact across a growing global customer base:

• Over 300,000 alerts reviewed by AI
• 99% accuracy in AI-led reviews
• 90% reduction in average handling time
  
  

These outcomes reflect more than just efficiency gains. They demonstrate how an AI-first approach can materially improve an organization's ability to detect, investigate, and respond to financial crime in real time.

‍

Customer Success Stories Highlighting Measurable Impact of Unit21’s AI Suite

‍

Unit21’s AI Suite is helping organizations streamline compliance, reduce manual effort, and scale without adding headcount. Across industries and geographies, clients are achieving faster reviews, fewer false positives, and fully unified workflows. Take a look at them below:

‍

Uphold

‍

Uphold, a global financial platform, faced challenges with manual STR and SAR filings and with fragmented workflows across tools such as Excel and legacy CMS platforms. Scaling efficiently without adding headcount was a priority.

‍

By consolidating transaction monitoring, case management, and regulatory filings in a single platform, Uphold gained real-time alerts, configurable rules without engineering support, and integrated SAR/CTR/FINTRAC filing, eliminating manual re-entry. Teams across time zones could now collaborate seamlessly.

‍

 Teams saw real improvements in their workflows, such as:

• 44% faster alert reviews with the AI Agent 
• STR preparation time reduced from nearly a week to under 30 minutes
• Zero engineering effort needed for rule updates
• The unified platform improved collaboration, audit readiness, and regulatory confidence

‍

Underdog

‍

Underdog, a rapidly growing fintech with a high transaction volume, had over 1,000 open alerts daily and slow adverse-media checks, which delayed SAR filings. Manual rule deployment took up to two weeks, creating operational bottlenecks.

‍

Unit21 enabled no-code rule editing to react instantly to new patterns, provided separate AML and RG risk scoring models, and integrated the alert → case → filing workflow. Custom Customer Risk Rating models helped reduce false positives while maintaining precise risk detection.

‍

Unit21 empowered Underdog with the following results:

• 72% reduction in alert backlog
• Rule deployment cut from 2 weeks to under 5 minutes
• Built-in adverse-media checks save hours per case
• AI Agent pilot accelerated reviews with high-level summaries and 15-20% fewer false positives
• Unified workflow improved audit readiness without adding headcount

‍

Nexo

‍

Nexo, a global crypto-native financial institution, relied on fragmented systems that were manually intensive, creating bottlenecks in alert review and case resolution. With Unit21, they implemented a unified, intelligence-driven platform that combines transaction monitoring, case management, and customer risk rating in a single system. 

‍

This integration eliminated context switching for analysts and enabled a more fluid workflow across jurisdictions. Key outcomes include:

‍

• 93% reduction in false positives, freeing analysts to focus on true risk
• 57% of alert reviews are automated via AI Agents, with a target of 80%
• Faster investigations through enhanced network analysis and unified case management
• Real-time CRR recalculations, providing immediate visibility into customer risk
• Centralized workflows replacing fragmented tools, enabling global regulatory alignment

‍

The Future of Risk Management Starts Now

‍

Financial crime will not slow down, and neither should your technology. As fraudsters adopt AI at scale, your defense cannot rely on legacy systems or incremental upgrades. Unit21’s AI Suite delivers the automation, intelligence, and adaptability that modern risk teams need — not in the future, but today.

‍

Want to see it in action? Join us on December 10 for an webinar. 👉 Reserve your spot

‍

You will get a firsthand look at how AI-driven workflows are transforming fraud and AML programs for leading institutions. Discover how your team can reduce noise, accelerate investigations, and build a more agile compliance strategy from day one.