Three systems, one mission, and a Monday morning nightmare
Before Unit21, the compliance infrastructure at Sunrise Banks was fragmented and siloed. One system handled monitoring for fintech partners; a second system designed for traditional banks, covered the core side. And a sprawling collection of spreadsheets handled everything neither system could: roughly ten typologies that required manual tracking across daily, weekly, and monthly reports.
The problems compounded each other. The systems offered no custom rule building – scenarios were fixed, vendor-defined, and static. When Sunrise Banks attempted a version migration to modernize the platform, the project stretched to two years and still failed to bring the core bank into scope. And they weren’t built for the complexity of a sponsor bank serving millions of fintech-linked customers.
"With our old systems, we had no control over our own rules; every scenario was out of the box, and a version migration took us two years. With Unit21, my team built and launched new detection rules ourselves in days. That's a completely different operating model."
— Taylor Fox, BSA Director & Officer, Sunrise Banks
The spreadsheet layer was the most acute pain point. Analysts specialized in individual report types, which meant a single absence could stall an entire alert queue. When a customer appeared across multiple systems, analysts in one queue had no visibility into what analysts in another queue were seeing. Every Monday, the monitoring team spent nearly six hours reconciling reports, checking due dates, and producing a weekly scorecard just to understand where things stood.
Regulators encouraged Sunrise Banks to consolidate into a single system. The Sunrise team knew that fragmented monitoring created blind spots, and blind spots created risk for a bank with a community mission it took seriously.
- Three disconnected systems with no unified visibility across fintech and core portfolios.
- No cross-system awareness: a customer with alerts in either system was simultaneously invisible to analysts in each queue.
- Six hours spent every Monday manually reconciling spreadsheet reports into a weekly scorecard.
- Old systems offered no custom rule building—all scenarios were out-of-the-box and vendor-controlled.
- Analysts siloed by report type, creating single points of failure when staff were out.
One system for every entity, every rule, and every team
When Sunrise Banks evaluated replacement systems, unified coverage was table stakes. What separated Unit21 was the flexibility to build, test, and deploy rules entirely in-house—and the ability to apply that flexibility across a monitoring footprint as diverse as the one at Sunrise Banks.
The side-by-side validation process removed any doubt. Rather than running months of parallel live operations in both platforms, Sunrise Banks ran historical transaction data through Unit21’s rule engine and compared outputs. The result was consistent across both fintech and core portfolios: Unit21 generated more valid hits than either legacy system.
Unit21’s flexible rule engine addressed what the previous systems never could. Sunrise Banks migrated roughly 60 of its more than 70 existing rules directly into the platform. The remaining 10 were ingested into Unit21 and worked as standard alerts, preserving full coverage without requiring complete re-engineering upfront.
"I trained my own staff on rule building. It's not hard, and that's the point. We don't wait on a vendor anymore. When a new typology surfaces, we build a rule right then and there."
— Taylor Fox, BSA Director & Officer, Sunrise Banks
Risk rating was another step change. The bank’s fintech portfolio includes populations that require nuanced risk grading, including LMI lending programs tied to CDFI requirements, and prepaid cards with high entity turnover. Unit21 allowed the team to pull entity-level flags for every customer type, bringing fintech risk grading into alignment with core bank standards for the first time.
The sponsor bank architecture mattered equally. Sunrise Banks configured its Unit21 environment with full segregation between core and fintech, down to the instrument and product level, giving compliance leadership complete oversight while preserving the granular controls needed across 15 different fintech programs.
Looking ahead, AI Agent capabilities were a decisive factor in the selection. With aggressive growth targets and a finite analyst team, Sunrise Banks knew it needed a single platform that could scale faster than headcount.
- Single platform replaced both fintech and core bank platforms, with full segregation by partner, product type, and portfolio.
- Historical side-by-side validation confirmed higher valid hit rates than either legacy system across all portfolios.
- Self-service rule engine eliminated vendor dependency—staff trained and building rules independently within weeks of go-live.
- Unified customer risk grading across fintech and core for the first time, pulling entity-level flags across diverse customer types.
- AI Agent capabilities identified as critical to scaling from $3B to $5B bank without proportional headcount growth.
"We're managing 7,000 to 8,000 active alerts at any given time with a team of 11. AI agents aren't a nice-to-have—they're how we get from 60-day resolution down to 30 days. Low-risk alerts will get handled autonomously so my team can focus on what actually needs human judgment."
Complete visibility, faster decisions, and compliance operation ready to scale to $7B
The most immediate change after go-live wasn’t a metric; it was a Monday morning. The six hours Robert Walker, Manager of Monitoring Services, previously spent reconciling reports, checking due dates across three systems, and building a weekly scorecard simply disappeared. With everything in one system, visibility into the 7,000 to 8,000 active alerts in flight at any given time is instant.
The cross-system visibility also transformed how the fraud and AML teams collaborate. Previously, the team’s two systems were entirely separate environments – a customer with open alerts in both was invisible to analysts in each. Today, when an alert surfaces in Unit21, analysts see every related case, prior filing, and open alert in the same view. If a case needs to shift from the fraud queue to AML—or vice versa—it’s a single click, not a manual copy-and-paste exercise that requires opening a new case from scratch.
"In our old system, a customer could have open alerts in both systems at the same time, and neither team would know. Now, fraud and AML are working in the same environment. If a case needs to move, it's ne click. That's not a small thing."
— Taylor Fox, BSA Director & Officer, Sunrise Banks
Team resilience improved alongside team capability. Because analysts had specialized in individual report types, a single absence previously stalled entire alert queues. With Unit21’s unified environment, every analyst is now cross-trained on every alert type. The team is more flexible, less fragile, and, as Robert Walker noted, “more engaged, because they’re encountering a broader range of financial crime typologies every day.”
Fraud detection capabilities have expanded meaningfully, too. When two significant fraud incidents emerged after go-live, the Sunrise Banks team used Unit21’s rule engine to build detection logic retroactively, ran historical validations, and confirmed both events would have been flagged within days. One involved ACH fraud targeting a new customer account; the other was an ATM card compromise that drained $15,000 over 30 days before the customer reported anything. Both patterns now have active monitoring rules—built and deployed entirely in-house.
QC operations have been modernized in parallel. Checklists that previously lived in spreadsheets, maintained separately for each alert type, are now embedded directly in alerts and queues, standardized across all typologies. Sampling is straightforward. Internal audit reviewed the full system and came away enthusiastically impressed, signaling confidence ahead of the next full regulatory exam scheduled for January 2027.
The biggest chapter is still ahead. With a team of 11 analysts and investigators managing 7,000 to 8,000 active alerts, Sunrise Banks is actively evaluating Unit21’s AI Agents to automate disposition of low-risk alerts, creating a tiered model where analysts focus their time on high-risk cases and the AI handles the rest. The immediate target: compress the average alert resolution window from 60 to 30 days.
For a CDFI bank with aggressive ambitions of growing $2 billion in assets within three years through fintech expansion, the compliance infrastructure to support that growth is now in place. What once required three systems, a spreadsheet army, and six lost hours every Monday is now a single, analyst-controlled platform ready to scale.
- Monday scorecard tracking eliminated: from six hours of manual reconciliation to real-time visibility in one system.
- Fraud + AML teams operating in a shared environment with one-click case reassignment across queues.
- Analysts cross-trained on all alert typologies, eliminating single points of failure from specialization.
- New fraud detection rules built and retroactively validated against real incidents (ACH fraud and ATM card compromise).
- QC checklists standardized in-system across all alert types, replacing per-typology spreadsheet tracking.
- Internal audit’s strong endorsement after a full system demo, ahead of the January 2027 regulatory exam.
- In active evaluation of AI Agents targeting 60→30 day alert resolution and autonomous low-risk alert disposition at scale.
"When we ran our historical data through Unit21 side by side against our previous systems, the results were clear: Unit21 generated more valid hits across both our fintech and core banking. That's what made the decision easy."
