Armed with new funding, the company’s AI agents aim to help smaller banks compete around compliance
There’s an increasing need for financial institutions to meet compliance requirements or end up on the wrong side of the government. One of the more recent “landmark fines” was issued to TD Bank in October 2024 by the Justice Department, over $1.8 billion, after the bank pleaded guilty to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and money laundering.
And even as the Trump administration and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent contemplate rolling back some requirements, the task of managing this complexity is still a large one.
The banking industry isn’t yet fully embracing artificial intelligence, but some banks increasingly see the benefits of AI in improving best practices and processes. CEOs of some of the top firms, like JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sach’s David Solomon, and Atom Bank’s Mark Mullen, tout the opportunity for augmenting workers and accelerating services.
This includes one of the top onerous overhead costs and time-consuming tasks for banks– compliance. Enter firms like Greenlite, which are in a prime position to solve this problem with their proprietary AI agents.
CEO Will Lawrence and CTO Alex Jin founded Greenlite in 2023 to help banks and financial technology organizations meet standards and fulfill government requirements, while reducing the cost and time burden. Greenlite’s AI agents work inside of an organization’s existing anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer (KYC) systems to automate repetitive jobs. It’s an area of banking that hasn’t been transformed by technology yet in the same way that marketing or engineering industries have been.
At the core of Greenlite’s technology is what Lawrence called the “trust infrastructure,” which he explained was due to the regulated industry environment and mission-critical workflows. The technology has to be transparent– something that a company could explain to its auditor, he told Fintech Nexus. This frees up analysts to focus on more high-priority work, according to Lawrence.
“That’s why I was so excited about bringing better technology, specifically AI agents, to the world of compliance, because it allows us to ultimately serve more people,” he said. We build AI agents for compliance and financial services. Our clients trust our agents to audit mission-critical work, like sanction reviews and anti-money laundering investigations.”
Prior to starting Greenlite, Lawrence was leading product development for Facebook’s anti-money laundering platform, working to combat financial crimes across payment, gaming, and e-commerce use cases. He watched as compliance teams struggled under mountains of manual reviews and endless regulatory challenges.
Facebook wanted to expand their payment offerings, for example, WhatsApp payments, into different markets. Not being an expert in compliance at the time, he thought international expansion was about translating user experience into local languages or customs. Soon he realized it was something else entirely.
“Expansion of financial products is 95% compliance, risk, and fraud, and those are the things that make it challenging to launch into new markets,” Lawrence said. “There are infinite amounts of challenges there, and for a very technology-forward organization, they might have the internal capabilities to build it, but we work with a lot of banks that don’t have those, especially community and regional banks.”
It’s particularly an issue when it comes to fraud. According to Lawrence, the TD Bank example is happening because of two different trends: compliance teams are understaffed and don’t have the capacity to scale their programs, and new threat vectors continue to emerge–think of fraudulent identification and deep fakes.
To tackle these problems, Lawrence teamed up with Jin to build Greenlite to help those community and regional banks combat new fraud vectors and have more capacity through technology, like AI agents.
Today, Greenlite works with clients regulated banks and fintech clients, including Coastal Community Bank, Ramp, Betterment, and Mercury, many of which are overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company’s customers are seeing progress from using the products.. ??One regulated bank, scaling customers through an embedded finance program, saw due diligence review time decrease by 70% from a four-hour job. Another client, a regulated broker-dealer, expanded across a dozen markets by deploying AI agents to handle incremental sanction reviews. Meanwhile, a fintech client was able to reduce time spent on routine alert handling on the anti-money laundering side by 90%.
Investors also see the validation. In May, Greylock, which invested in Greenlite’s seed round, came back to lead a $15 million Series A infusion into the company. Y Combinator also returned to join new investors Thomson Reuters and Canvas Prime, and a group of angel investors, including a former Fannie Mae CEO.
“We aim to build the best AI agents for financial services,” Lawrence said. “Compliance and risk are just where we started. Our goal is to redefine the backbone of how financial services are delivered globally.”
