“We’re going to lose if we don’t use AI”: Unit21 founder warns banks on rising fraud threats

February 20, 2026

Agentic AI is transforming the world of compliance as we know it and firms avoiding it are vulnerable to criminals.

Unit21 is at the forefront of the blending of AI with compliance. The RegTech company boasts a suite of no-code solutions for fraud and AML operations, covering payment fraud prevention, sanctions screening, AML transaction monitoring, device intelligence and more. One of its latest, and most exciting developments, is the AI Agent, which is helping teams automate fraud and AML operations by 90%.

Trisha Kothari, CEO and founder of Unit21, explained, “Today fraud and AML teams often drown in alerts. They spend so much time reviewing false positives taking time away from the actual fraudulent alerts.” Of the hundreds of alerts a company receives each day, only around 1% are escalated to suspicious activity. While efforts have been made to solve this challenge, most RegTech solutions only have minimal automated improvements. Whereas, Unit21’s AI Agent can handle the mundane work of screening, due diligence and transaction monitoring to free up time for compliance professionals for more strategic work.

Capabilities like this are redefining how compliance teams operate. For instance, Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT), a process of collecting and analysing publicly available information, was historically reserved for high-risk alerts due to its time-consuming nature. However, AI allows companies to do this for every alert, not only streamlining existing workflows but expanding them to ensure more risks can be identified.

She added, “AI is really transformative. It focuses human work on the more important creative work, rather than paper pushing.”

Since its launch in May, Unit21’s AI Agent has reviewed over 300,000 alerts and boasts 99% accuracy. Kothari also offered some success stories from customers. US-based sports betting platform Underdog Fantasy has cut its alerts down by 72%, while European crypto company Nexo has experienced a 57% drop with a goal of reaching 80%.

Unit21 has also seen interest in AI from financial institutions.

Kothari noted, “When we started building our AI products, we thought banks would have hesitation against it. But it’s really been the opposite in terms of the adoption and excitement we are seeing.”

Trusting AI: Unit21’s 3 core principles

Regardless of how well AI is adopted or performs, questions around trust inevitably arise. This is especially the case for compliance where mistakes can result in significant financial and reputational damage. As such, Unit21 has three core principles to foster trust in the technology.

The first is around data protection, ensuring information never leaves the environment. There is often a fear that sensitive data will be used to train models or could be left exposed, but Unit21’s tool keeps everything contained in the environment.

Secondly, its AI is fully explainable and auditable. Clients can see what the AI is doing behind the scenes, why it is doing it, what data it is using, and can tweak it if needed.

Finally, the AI is highly accurate, demonstrating human-level proficiency.

“We’ve been around for seven years. We know you can’t just release an AI product and get adoption. So, before we even released the product, we demoed it to the OCC and state regulators, and we have a quarterly standing meeting with FinCEN. We’ve been getting feedback on what they want and how they want it to be. That’s been really helpful to get regulatory awareness regarding what we are doing.”

Implementing an effective AI tool is no longer optional, Kothari noted. It is completely transforming AML and without it, firms will struggle to keep pace with rising threats. She said, “Fraudsters are already using AI, and they’ve been using it from day one. If the industry doesn’t use AI, we’re playing a battle of whack-a-mole. We’re going to lose if we don’t use AI.” With this view of the future, it is no surprise over 40% of Unit21’s R&D is being focused on AI.

On a concluding note, Kothari said, “We are focused on bringing the latest technology innovations to this industry. From a banking perspective, it’s important to have a partner who is leading institutions into the modern era to help against all the new waves of attack.

Unit21 was recently named in the RegTech100 2026. Read the full list, which names the 100 most innovative companies financial institutions need to know about in 2026, here.