Unit21 named Category Leader by Chartis in Enterprise and Payment Fraud Solutions—and the highest-scoring vendor for AI

Today, we're sharing a milestone: Chartis Research has named Unit21 a Category Leader in its 2026 RiskTech Quadrants® for Enterprise and Payment Fraud Solutions. Across the full evaluation, Chartis writes that Unit21 "scores highest across all vendors evaluated in AI functionality."

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For context, Chartis evaluated more than 40 vendors on a 1–5 scale, where no vendor has ever received a 5, scores between 4.1 and 5.0 are categorized as best-in-class capabilities, and scores between 3.1 and 4.0 are advanced capabilities. Unit21 earned best-in-class scores in five categories spanning AI, configurability, workflow, case management, and modeling.

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Here's how the analysts summed it up:

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"Unit21 sits at the front of a market shift Chartis is seeing, where AI is not simply a feature but a structural market driver. The combination of best-in-class AI capabilities, configurability, and workflow orchestration—alongside its consortium and graph analytics—places Unit21 as a Category Leader and among the vendors best positioned to define the next generation of enterprise fraud prevention." 

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— Philip Mackenzie, Senior Research Principal, Chartis Research

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We've published a dedicated Chartis Vendor Spotlight on Unit21 with the full analysis. Below is a quick walkthrough of what the analysts wrote and what it means for the fraud and compliance teams we work with every day, especially our AML customers consolidating fraud onto our platform.

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Why This Recognition Matters

Chartis's 2026 update describes a fraud market that is undergoing structural change. Three themes anchor the analysts' view:

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1. AI is now a structural market driver. Vendors aren't graded on whether they offer AI, but on how effectively they operationalize it, govern it, and prove every decision to a regulator.
2. Configurability and orchestration are now table stakes. Fraud typologies move fast. The teams that win are the ones whose tools can adapt without waiting for engineers or vendor change requests.
3. Fraud is no longer a transaction-level problem. It's an enterprise-wide challenge that spans onboarding, identity, payments, AML, and customer experience. Buyers are moving away from stitched-together point solutions toward unified platforms.

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Unit21 was designed for this new reality. Notably, Chartis explicitly endorses Unit21's "AI Risk Infrastructure" positioning, calling out AI Agents that "execute, govern and adapt fraud detection workflows" as the deliberate productization of that strategy.

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What Chartis Highlighted: Five Best-in-Class Scores

Best-in-class scores (4.1+) are rare. Unit21 earned five of them.

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1. AI and GenAI functionality — 4.3 (highest across all vendors evaluated)

Chartis identifies AI not as a feature but as a structural market driver, and Unit21 received the highest score among all evaluated vendors in this category. The analysts called out our "clear strategic emphasis on AI as the underlying infrastructure of [our] fraud (and AML) platform."

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This isn't accidental. We've spent the last two years building production AI, not experimental AI:

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• The AI Investigation Agent pulls transaction histories, runs watchlist checks, assembles evidence packages, drafts narratives, and presents a complete investigation to the analyst. The agent does the work; the human makes the call.
• The Strategy to Rule AI Agent and AI Rule Recommendation Agent analyze alert outcomes and propose new or optimized rules—tailored to each organization's unique data and risk profile, with full audit-ready evidence and shadow-mode validation before deployment.
• Custom Tasks (BYOT v2) let customers configure agents to their own SOPs, narrative formats, and escalation rules—safely building their own AI Agents on the same infrastructure.
• All of it operates inside the case management environment, with full audit trails and human-in-the-loop controls—exactly the governance posture compliance teams need to defend AI to a regulator.

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Today, our AI Agents process more than 200,000 alerts per month across customers, including Rippling, Crypto.com, Circle, GreenDot, WorldRemit, Nexo, and Underdog, delivering results like 57% of alert reviews automated at Nexo with a 93% reduction in false positives, and 72% alert reduction at Underdog.

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As we tell our customers: if it's not defensible to a regulator, we don't ship it.

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2. Configurability — 4.4 (highest individual score)

Configurability is one of Unit21's largest competitive advantages, and Chartis gave it our highest individual score across the entire evaluation. The analysts highlighted "no-code capabilities, customizable workflows, and flexible deployment model" as direct alignment with what the market is asking for, noting that customers report "deploying new detection rules in minutes rather than weeks," supported by AI-driven rule generation and validation.

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In practice, this means a fintech fraud team can stand up a new rule, test it in shadow mode against real historical data, validate impact, and deploy it—often the same day, without a vendor ticket and without waiting on engineering. For high-growth platforms where fraud patterns shift weekly, that velocity is the difference between staying ahead and playing catch-up.

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3. Workflow and case management — 4.2

The analysts wrote that Unit21's strength here is "self-service configurability, operational flexibility, emphasis on orchestration, and ability to create and test custom AI Agents as well as complex multi-step automations." One platform for detection, investigation, narratives, and SAR/CTR/FINTRAC filing means analysts no longer have to tab between five tools to do one job.

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4. Workflow and analytics — 4.2

Chartis sees workflow and orchestration as increasingly central to vendor competitiveness. Unit21's score reflects "platform-centric architecture, no-code self-service configurability and focus on bringing Agentic AI into operations as the core rather than an add-on"—particularly relevant for institutions seeking rapid deployment and lower operational friction in growth-focused sectors.

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5. Modeling and testing — 4.1

The analysts called out the platform's emphasis on "configurability, AI enablement, and customer control"—supporting the shift toward "build your own" fraud models. Crucially, Chartis singled out backtesting and shadow-mode rule simulation as the mechanism that "[validates] model performance against live data before deployment, reducing the gap between modeling and production." Static models can't keep up with adversarial threats, and Unit21's testing and simulation tools were recognized as a real differentiator.

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What Else Chartis Called Out

Beyond the five best-in-class scores, the spotlight highlighted several capabilities worth surfacing for fraud teams evaluating platforms:

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• Behavioral monitoring (3.9) — including the Device Risk Score and our "custom data" and "custom variables" model that lets institutions monitor any type of activity, regardless of payment method, risk indicator, or data type. The analysts called this a "future-proof model for fraud monitoring as the financial ecosystem—and fraud—evolves."
• The Consortium — Chartis writes that Unit21 "operates one of the largest cross-institution fraud consortiums in the market, with more than 100 participating financial institutions and coverage of over 100 million U.S. adults, providing network-level mule and money laundering signals that strengthen detection across customers." A bad actor seen at one Unit21 customer protects every other customer.
• Sub-250ms decisioning latency — Chartis's own number, called out under Speed, Volume, and Performance for payment fraud. Real-time across cards, ACH, wires, RTP, FedNow, and crypto.
• Graph analytics — explicitly listed by the analyst as a key differentiator in his quote.

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What This Means for Fraud Teams Evaluating Their Stack

Unit21 has always served a broad market—banks, credit unions, fintechs, crypto, and BaaS providers—but a meaningful portion of our growth in 2026 is coming from two segments: fintechs and crypto platforms looking to consolidate fraud + AML onto a single AI-first platform, and existing AML customers extending into fraud.

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Both industry segments benefit from this recognition in a specific way: it gives technology selection committees, CROs, and Heads of Compliance an externally validated reason to take a closer look. And the underlying scores tell a coherent story:

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• For fintechs and crypto platforms, the configurability, modeling, AI, and workflow scores together describe a platform built for teams that move fast, ship product weekly, and need controls that adapt at the same pace.
• For Unit21 AML customers extending into fraud, the Category Leader placement across both quadrants validates that you can consolidate without compromising. You don't need to add a second vendor to get a fraud capability that the analysts rate at the top of the market.
• For financial institutions, the AI score combined with the workflow and modeling scores answers the question we hear most: "Can we get modern AI capabilities without sacrificing the explainability and audit-readiness our examiners require?" Yes—and analysts have now scored it that way.

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Read the Full Vendor Spotlight

Chartis published a dedicated vendor spotlight on Unit21 with the full breakdown of scores, capability commentary, and market context. It's the most complete external view of our platform we've ever made available, and it's worth a read regardless of where you are in your evaluation.

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If you'd rather see it live, you can book a demo and we'll walk you through the AI Agents, the Consortium, and the workflow capabilities behind the scores.

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Chartis Research and the Chartis RiskTech Quadrant® are registered trademarks of Chartis Research Ltd. Quote used with permission from Chartis Research. The Vendor Spotlight is published with permission and reflects Chartis's independent analysis.

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