The Challenge
The platform screened counterparties and transactions manually against sanctions and watch lists. Updates were missed, false positives buried analysts, and — most dangerously — the team could not explain to a regulator *why* a given transaction had been cleared or held. In a regulated business, an unexplainable decision is a liability.
The Solution
We built a hybrid engine that combines deterministic rules with pluggable AI detectors. Rules handle the unambiguous cases — a sanctioned party is always blocked. AI detectors add nuance: jurisdiction risk, route anomalies, valuation mismatches, and document gaps, each producing a confidence score. A fusion layer corroborates signals across both, and crucially, AI alone can never silently block a transaction — it raises it for human review. This is the production philosophy described in cross-border compliance AI.
Architecture
A rule analyzer evaluates each transaction against canonical, versioned lists. Pluggable AI detectors run in parallel, each emitting findings with confidence. The fusion stage combines them, applying corroboration boosts and data-gap discounts. Every step is written to an append-only audit log so the full reasoning chain is reconstructable. Screening is triggered by platform events, so it happens in real time as transactions flow.
Technology Stack
A deterministic rules engine, a registry of pluggable AI detectors, versioned sanctions datasets, an append-only audit store, and event-driven triggers. The work draws on our AI solutions and AI agents practices and underpins the real-time settlement path.
Results
Screening moved from batch to real time, false positives fell by roughly 60%, and every decision now carries a complete, exportable reasoning chain. Coverage spans more than 180 jurisdictions, with new rules and detectors added without redeploying the core.
Lessons Learned
The single most important design rule was that AI advises but never silently blocks — it escalates to a human. Pairing deterministic rules with probabilistic detectors gave both certainty where it mattered and nuance where it helped. And an append-only audit log turned compliance from a defensive scramble into a routine export.