New product, geography, & customer segments add fresh risk vectors
As Rippling expanded its suite of HR, payroll, and financial products globally, its compliance team faced a mounting challenge: keeping pace with rapid growth while maintaining airtight controls across multiple legal entities and jurisdictions.
Rippling’s legacy, SQL-based system required engineering intervention for even small rule changes. Workflows were siloed, with payment screening and transaction monitoring lived in separate tools, resulting in duplicate effort, slower investigations, and increased regulatory risk.
Analysts spent valuable hours gathering data from disparate systems, slowing investigations and limiting visibility. Rippling needed a way to move faster, operate smarter, and maintain compliance integrity as it scaled.
To add to the urgency, Rippling is launching new banking products where they need real-time interdiction capabilities to immediately block or allow decisions.
- Limited engineering bandwidth to maintain in-house compliance tools.
- Fragmented workflows, where screening and monitoring operated in isolation.
- Regulatory pressure as Rippling grew into a multi-entity, global operation.
- Inflexible screening tools with limited regional granularity and tuning capability.
Agility, intelligence, and control - All in one platform
Rippling partnered with Unit21 to modernize and unify its compliance infrastructure, replacing rigid, SQL-based rules with real-time monitoring that detects and blocks suspicious activity during authorization before funds settle. This speed to response became a cornerstone of Rippling’s banking product expansion, enabling instant interdiction that meets regulatory expectations and ensures prohibited transactions never move.
Unit21 also enabled Rippling to build a multi-entity environment that mirrors the company’s expanding footprint across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Europe. Each entity operates within its own tailored workspace, complete with jurisdiction-specific rules, access permissions, and filing workflows. This structure ensures both operational flexibility and regulatory precision as Rippling scales globally.
Through unified case management, Rippling consolidated alerts, investigations, and filings into a single platform. What was once fragmented across multiple systems is now a streamlined, end-to-end process improving visibility, reducing manual work, and creating a consistent audit trail from alert to case to report.
Finally, Rippling implemented dynamic customer risk scoring models to help prioritize investigations, enabling analysts to focus on higher-value decision-making. And with built-in validation features, Rippling can test new rules before deployment, fine-tuning detection logic with confidence. Together, these solutions give Rippling the agility to adapt quickly, manage complexity, and maintain compliance at scale.
- Real-Time Monitoring: Blocks risky transactions in seconds.
- Multi-Entity Setup: Tailored environments by region and license.
- Unified Case Management: One platform for alerts, cases, and filings.
- Risk Scoring: Prioritizes reviews with dynamic customer risk models.
- Low-Code Rules: Empowers compliance to adapt fast without engineers.
“Unit21’s risk scoring helps us focus where it matters most so our team spends time on the highest-value reviews, not routine noise.”
The results: Real-time control, audit-ready confidence, & scalable growth
Unit21 has transformed Rippling’s compliance operations into a unified, scalable system built for growth. By consolidating alerts, investigations, and filings into a single platform, Rippling eliminated duplicate work and gained full visibility across teams and entities, resulting in faster, more consistent reviews and a clear audit trail as the company expands its global financial footprint. Abraham stated, “Unit21 gives us the flexibility and control to move fast. We can tailor rules, test safely, and scale compliance as quickly as Rippling grows.”
This structure also strengthened Rippling’s audit readiness, leading to a successful outcome in a recent multi-state regulatory exam. Auditors praised the clarity and completeness of the documentation, validating Rippling’s investment in a transparent, well-organized compliance process.
With real-time controls, Rippling can now detect and block suspicious activity in seconds, stopping risky transactions before funds settle. This capability meets regulatory expectations for proactive oversight and supports Rippling’s growing banking and payments businesses .“Real-time monitoring is critical for our banking products. With Unit21, we can identify and block suspicious activity in seconds before funds ever move,” states Abraham.
Together, these capabilities have created a flexible, future-proof foundation that enables Rippling to scale compliance seamlessly across multiple entities, products, and jurisdictions without overburdening engineering or compliance resources.
TLDR: The Results
- Unified operations: One platform for alerts, investigations, and filings.
- Audit-ready: Passed multi-state exam with strong regulator feedback.
- Real-time control: Blocks suspicious activity within seconds.
- Scalable foundation: Supports global growth across entities and products.
“Our multi-state exam proved it, Unit21 delivers the structure, transparency, and clarity regulators expect from a world-class compliance program.”