Cultivating Robust Rules With Workflows Flexible Enough For Every Product, Partner, & Risk Pattern—& Powerful Enough For Scale

Central Payments sits at the center of a uniquely complex ecosystem: it provides program management for multiple financial institutions, oversees a wide range of products—from prepaid cards and payroll to DDA accounts and remittance programs—and must monitor fraud and AML activity across each of these distinct environments. Every program carries different behavioral patterns, risk signals, and transaction flows, which means fraud and suspicious activity rarely look the same twice. Yet their legacy technology forced them into a rigid, one-size-fits-all monitoring framework that couldn’t adapt to those differences. Rules had to apply universally across all programs, even when certain behaviors were relevant to only a single partner or product. Creating or adjusting those rules required long turnaround times, engineering support, and vendor intervention. In fast-moving fraud scenarios, those delays equated to financial losses.

The operations teams were overwhelmed by large alert queues and manual data gathering. Without customizable tools, analysts were stuck stitching together transactions, customer profiles, and behavioral patterns by hand, often across multiple bank instances—leading to inefficiency, high false positives, and risk of human error. Sanctions screening lived outside of transaction monitoring as a separate workflow, further fragmenting oversight and making it difficult to maintain consistent governance across OFAC and PEP reviews.

As Central Payments prepared for massive growth with new strategic partners and rapidly increasing account volumes, leadership recognized that their legacy systems could not scale with the business. They needed a platform that could handle real-time management of millions of accounts, support complex program-level distinctions, eliminate manual drag, integrate sanctions and transaction monitoring under one roof, and give them the agility to respond instantly to new fraud patterns. Importantly, they needed a partner who understood fintech and payments deeply—and who could meet modern demands for flexibility, configurability, and speed.

As Sridevi Anwar, Chief Risk Officer, explained, “We couldn’t do our best work with a rigid framework. Each program required a different approach, but changing or customizing rules took too long. We needed flexibility and speed.”

Unit21 offered exactly the level of flexibility, configurability, and operational acceleration that Central Payments had been unable to achieve with its legacy systems. The team needed a platform capable of supporting their diverse program landscape—one that would allow the creation of bespoke rules for individual partners and product types, adjust thresholds instantly as new trends surfaced, and operate with the speed required to stay ahead of fraud. From the outset, Unit21 provided the no-code environment they had been searching for: analysts could create, tune, and deploy rules on their own, without relying on engineering resources or waiting for slow vendor development cycles. In-platform validation and shadow mode gave them the ability to test new logic safely against historical data, helping them fine-tune rule performance and significantly reduce false positives before pushing anything live.
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“The ability to customize, validate, and act fast gives us control. We can respond to new risks, meet our partners’ needs, and support growth—without adding unnecessary overhead,” recalls Anwar.
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Equally transformative was Unit21’s unified architecture. Consolidation permits the team to see the full picture—cross-program trends, customer behavior, linked transactions, and sanctions risk—without hopping between systems or manually reconstructing the story. For a company operating across multiple financial institutions and product lines, this centralized visibility was essential.

What ultimately differentiated Unit21 was not just the technology but the partnership. From implementation onward, the Central Payments team experienced a level of responsiveness, expertise, and collaboration that was rare in the industry. When Central Payments needed functionality that didn’t yet exist, Unit21 enhanced the core product—rather than building brittle, custom one-offs—to ensure scalability and long-term maintainability. As Anwar put it, “Every company says they can do transaction monitoring, but we needed a partner who understood our space and would innovate alongside us.” With Unit21, they gained a modern platform built for fintech, real-time payments, ACH oversight, and the future of fraud detection—supported by a team ready to evolve with them.