Ionclear needed KYC, transaction monitoring, and SAR reporting for a new neobank — in ten weeks, before their partner-bank sponsorship deadline. We built it from scratch.
Ionclear had secured sponsorship from a top-20 US bank — contingent on a fully functioning compliance stack by the time their first cohort of merchant customers came online. They had product designers. They had a founder with a compliance background. They had no engineers.
They needed: KYC onboarding, real-time transaction monitoring, a case management UI, automated SAR filing, and a full audit trail — all built to pass a bank-partner readiness review. From scratch. In under 90 days.
We scoped the build around a single question: “what's the one thing the bank auditor will fail us on?” That became the critical path.
We wrote the transaction-monitoring rules engine in Rust on day three — before the login screen existed. Every other system was built around its contract.
LLMs triage alert queues and draft SAR narratives. A human always approves. We documented every prompt, every eval, every fallback — auditors love paper trails.
Append-only event log is the source of truth; everything else is a materialized view. Replay from any point, explain any decision, no reconstruction needed.
The compliance team spends 80% of their day here. We co-designed the UI with Ionclear's Head of Risk — three times — until the triage queue fit the mental model. Case close time dropped from 22 minutes (their old Excel process) to 3:40.
Analysts used to write Suspicious Activity Reports by hand — 90 minutes each. Our drafter reads the full case history, composes a compliant narrative, and hands the analyst a polished draft. They edit, sign, submit. Average: 4 minutes.