# Announcing Sardine's new compliance AI Agents for KYC, sanctions, and merchant risk

**Author:** Simon Taylor  
**Published:** 2025-02-27T00:00:00.000Z  
**Categories:** Product

Discover how Sardine's KYC and Sanctions Alerts AI agents enhance compliance and fraud detection, empowering your team to handle increasing workloads without the need for more staff.

Every fraud analyst, compliance officer, and underwriter will have a team of AI analysts to help them. Today we're introducing three of these:

- **KYC Onboarding Agent**
- **Sanctions Screening Agent**
- **Merchant Risk Agent**

## The cost challenge of BSA/AML compliance

Know Your Customer has become notoriously labor-intensive, slow, and costly. It can be argued to be largely ineffective because of how inefficient it has become.

- False positive rates in AML monitoring routinely exceed 90%.
- This leads to excessive burnout, churn and a difficulty hiring enough compliance officers.
- Major banks average 307 employees dedicated to KYC alone but still have significant gaps in BSA/AML as the complexity of the challenge balloons.
- 85% of corporations report negative experiences with bank onboarding.
- 12% have switched banks due to onboarding friction.

### KYC Onboarding Agent
For a BSA/AML compliant onboarding, name, address, date-of-birth and SSN have to be collected and verified. The agent automates thousands of onboarding edge cases.

**Mission:** Simplify and accelerate customer due diligence during onboarding.

**Process:** AI agent is trained with a sample set of onboarding sessions.

**Outcomes:** In testing, automated resolution pathways could be used for over 50% of onboarding cases, translating to a 75% reduction in routine case workload.

### Sanctions Screening Agent
**Mission:** Rapidly screen transactions and customers against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists with greater accuracy and fewer false positives.

**Process:** The agent is trained on standard operating procedures used by compliance teams.

**Outcomes:** Successful automated resolution pathways for over 50% of Sanctions, with a noted 80% increase in analyst productivity for one global investment firm.

### Merchant Risk Agent
**Mission:** Automate the risk assessment and ongoing monitoring of business customers in real-time.

**Process:** Collects data on businesses and gives a risk rating based on various factors.

## Agents that comply with Fair Lending, BSA/AML and SR 11-7

In the U.S., regulators set clear expectations for technology use in compliance. Banks must maintain rigorous model inventories, documentation, and oversight for any AI-driven tool, just as they do for traditional models.

Success requires:

1. Clear strategic vision
2. Stakeholder alignment
3. Disciplined implementation
4. Continuous improvement mindset

The traditional approach to compliance is unsustainable. The Agent Defense Model offers a pathway, combining human expertise with AI capabilities to accelerate revenue while strengthening controls. The time to act is now.