Any company that lets people open an account, move money, or trade crypto has to answer two separate questions before the law will leave it alone: who is this person (identity verification, KYC/KYB), and is this specific transaction suspicious (fraud and anti-money-laundering monitoring). Historically that meant screenshotting settings for auditors and hiring analysts to eyeball transaction spreadsheets. The tools below automate one or both jobs — some just check a driver's license and a selfie, others watch every payment in real time and can auto-file the regulatory paperwork when something looks wrong.
The short version: if you just need to verify who someone is at signup, Persona is the accessible, pay-as-you-go option built for startups. If you need to orchestrate identity checks across many providers and the whole customer lifecycle, Alloy is the enterprise-grade router. If your risk is fraud happening during the payment itself, Sardine scores it live. If you need a team to build and investigate their own detection rules and file suspicious-activity reports, Unit21 is built for that case work. And if you want KYC/KYB/AML decisions made without keeping a giant central database of everyone's ID documents, Zyphe takes a decentralized approach.
1. Persona — identity verification a startup can actually afford
Persona checks documents and selfies against 200+ countries' ID formats, with liveness checks to catch someone holding up a photo of a photo, and a no-code workflow builder so a compliance person (not an engineer) can adjust the rules. Pricing starts free and scales to roughly $1.50 per verification plus a $250/month Essential tier — accessible for a startup that can't afford an enterprise sales cycle. It's proven at real scale: Etsy, LinkedIn, Lyft and Square all use it.
Watch out for: per-verification cost adds up fast at high signup volume, and it's a single provider rather than a multi-vendor orchestration layer — if Persona's own checks miss something, there's no second opinion built in.
Pick Persona if: you need solid KYC at signup without an enterprise budget or sales call.
2. Alloy — one API in front of 270+ identity and fraud data providers
Alloy doesn't run its own identity checks so much as sit in front of everyone else's — orchestrating 270+ data providers behind a single API so a bank doesn't have to integrate each one separately. It covers the full customer lifecycle, not just the signup moment: onboarding, transaction monitoring, AML screening, ongoing risk re-checks. It's purpose-built for regulated financial institutions and serves 800+ of them.
Watch out for: no public pricing at all — it's an enterprise sales process from the first click — and it's overkill if you just need one identity-verification provider, not an orchestration layer across many.
Pick Alloy if: you're a bank or fintech juggling multiple data providers and want one API and one contract instead of five.
3. Sardine — scores the fraud risk while the payment is happening
Most fraud tools react after the fact. Sardine scores a payment as risky or safe in the moment, by looking at the device, behavior and identity behind it — not just the transaction amount. It bundles fraud detection, KYC/KYB and sanctions screening into one platform, and its fraud-intelligence consortium (patterns shared anonymously across its customer base) is a real network effect: 450+ enterprise customers including Nubank, Intuit and FIS.
Watch out for: some of its headline scale numbers (billions of transactions/devices, sub-100ms latency) are vendor-reported and worth a direct methodology question in a sales call, and like most of this category, pricing is fully custom enterprise.
Pick Sardine if: your exposure is mostly payment fraud in real time, not slow-moving KYC paperwork.
4. Unit21 — no-code rule building for transaction monitoring and SAR filing
Unit21 is built for the risk team that needs to write and adjust its own fraud and money-laundering detection rules without waiting on an engineering sprint, then investigate the cases those rules flag, then file the resulting regulatory reports (SARs, STRs, CTRs) — all in one platform. Its fraud-data consortium covers 80M+ US adults, and the company reports its customers file roughly 5% of all US Suspicious Activity Reports, a genuine usage-scale signal rather than a marketing number.
Watch out for: its regulatory-filing features are US-focused (SARs/STRs/CTRs specifically), and — as with Sardine and Alloy — pricing requires a demo and a sales conversation.
Pick Unit21 if: your risk team needs to own its own detection logic and case investigation, not just consume someone else's black-box score.
5. Zyphe — KYC/KYB/AML decisions without a central document database
Zyphe runs KYC, KYB and AML checks for banks and fintechs but stores personal data in a decentralized, encrypted way rather than one central database an attacker could breach in a single hit. It makes automated compliance decisions in roughly 12 seconds on average, keeps a per-decision audit trail built to survive a regulatory review, and plugs into 17+ existing compliance tools instead of asking a team to rip them out.
Watch out for: pricing is completely unpublished, "AI making compliance decisions" is a category still under active regulatory scrutiny, and it's not a fit for a low-volume small business — this is built for financial institutions doing checks at real volume.
Pick Zyphe if: reducing the blast radius of a data breach matters as much to you as the KYC/AML decision itself.
Which one should you actually pick?
| Tool | What it's really for | Pricing model | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Persona | Identity verification (KYC) at signup | ~$1.50/check, $250/mo tier, free tier available | Startups without a compliance team |
| Alloy | Orchestrates 270+ ID/fraud data providers | Custom enterprise, no public pricing | Banks juggling multiple data vendors |
| Sardine | Real-time payment fraud scoring | Custom enterprise, no public pricing | Payment processors, high-risk merchants |
| Unit21 | Transaction monitoring, case management, SAR filing | Custom enterprise, no public pricing | Risk teams that want to own their own rules |
| Zyphe | Decentralized KYC/KYB/AML decisioning | Custom enterprise, no public pricing | Institutions minimizing breach exposure |
None of these fully overlap despite living in the same broad category. Persona is the only one a small team can actually self-serve into without a sales call — everything else here is an enterprise product with a demo gate. If you're past the point of needing just an identity check and into the point of needing ongoing fraud and AML monitoring at scale, the real decision is less "which vendor is best" and more "do we want an orchestration layer across many providers (Alloy), a real-time fraud score (Sardine), a rules-and-case-management workbench (Unit21), or a privacy-first architecture (Zyphe)" — because those are four different jobs wearing the same "compliance software" label.