Chrisjan Wüst, Co-Founder & CTO of Sphinx

Chrisjan Wüst

CTO & Co-Founder

Chrisjan is the Co-Founder & CTO of Sphinx, based in San Francisco. A self-taught engineer from Cape Town who started building at 13, he leads the team building AI compliance agents that banks actually trust.

Blog posts by this author

Compliance
AML Rule Backtesting and Shadow Mode: Test Before You Deploy

How to backtest AML rules on historical data, run shadow mode and champion-challenger in production, and document results for model risk management.

Compliance
Entity Resolution for Beneficial Ownership: How the Graph Gets Built

How entity resolution and graph analytics identify beneficial owners: probabilistic matching, blocking, indirect ownership math, cycles, registry limits.

Compliance
Illegal Betting Transaction Monitoring: Brazil's Ban Moves the Money

Brazil's betting ban pushes 30M bettors to illegal sites. What Pix monitoring teams will see, SPA Ordinance 2,750's red flags, and why alert queues flood.

Compliance
Crypto Travel Rule Compliance: What VASPs Must Collect and Send

What the crypto Travel Rule requires of VASPs: FATF R.16, FinCEN's $3,000 rule, EU and UK thresholds, self-hosted wallets, IVMS 101, and the sunrise gap.

Compliance
Bust-Out Fraud Detection: The Borrower Who Never Meant to Pay

How bust-out fraud works, how it differs from default and account takeover, the signals and features that catch it, and why the loss ends up as a SAR.

Compliance
Sanctions Screening Name Matching: How Fuzzy Matching Actually Works

How fuzzy name matching works in sanctions screening: Levenshtein, Jaro-Winkler, phonetic keys, OFAC's own scorer, threshold trade-offs, and validation.

Compliance
Third-Party AML Due Diligence: How Banks Should Evaluate Vendors

How banks evaluate AML vendors under OCC and FFIEC third-party risk rules, including residual BSA risk for processors, screening, BPO, and model vendors.

Compliance
AML Independent Testing Requirements: What Examiners Expect

BSA independent testing: independence, risk-based frequency, sampling, board reporting, and what OCC examiners expect after Bulletin 2025-37.

Deep dive posts by this author

Deploying Interpretable AI Agents in Compliance
AI
Deploying Interpretable AI Agents in Compliance

Rule engines flag everything and explain nothing. Interpretable agents argue both sides before a person decides.

Validating Source of Funds When Documents Can't Be Trusted
Document Fraud
Validating Source of Funds When Documents Can't Be Trusted

Any payslip can be forged in minutes. Five gates separate real provenance from a file that only looks like it.

Crypto Transaction Monitoring at Block Speed
Compliance
Crypto Transaction Monitoring at Block Speed

Funds hop five chains before the alert opens. Five stages on one wallet turn a hop count into a disposition.

Behavioral Transaction Monitoring
Compliance
Behavioral Transaction Monitoring

Launderers already know your thresholds. Six behavioral lenses turn an alert into a narrative an examiner can follow.

Reducing False Positives in Watchlist Screening
Compliance
Reducing False Positives in Watchlist Screening

Nine in ten screening alerts are noise. Separate matching from the decision so the alerts that matter get read.

AI
Financial Crime In The Age Of AI

AI didn't just speed up fraud, it changed the rules. A handbook on deepfakes, autonomous laundering, and how compliance teams fight back without failing the exam.