Fraud is rising fast. Identity fraud has more than doubled in the past three years, and synthetic identities in North America jumped over 300% year-on-year. For compliance teams, that’s not a headline – it’s a queue full of alerts, 80% of which often turn out to be false positives. Each one can cost $5 to review manually. At scale, that’s tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars spent just to confirm “no issue.”
Alviere runs programs that onboard thousands of customers and process millions of transactions every month. Without the right systems, false positives would overwhelm their compliance team and slow down onboarding.
How the flow works
At Alviere, the setup is simple. Hawk monitors transactions in real time and generates alerts. Once those alerts are created, Sphinx takes over. Every single alert is reviewed against Alviere’s policies, and from there, the system produces one of two outcomes:
– Closed as a false positive, with reasoning attached.
– Escalated as a potential true positive case, with a short memo summarizing the risk.
By the time something reaches an analyst, it’s already been sorted and explained. In practice, that means about 4 out of 5 alerts get closed automatically before a human ever touches them.
What this changes for compliance teams
This shift has a direct impact on how compliance teams spend their time. Instead of wading through piles of false alarms, analysts now focus only on the alerts that show real signs of risk. That changes the job in four major ways:
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
– Workload: Today, 80% of alerts are closed automatically, which means analysts have thousands fewer cases to manually examine.. Instead of reviewing 100 alerts to find 20 worth investigating, they now start with the 20.
– Onboarding: When customers are stuck in review, abandonment spikes. There can be up to 40% drop off if KYC processes take too long. With Sphinx filtering out false positives in seconds, legitimate customers move through onboarding faster and completion rates improve.
– Cost: Manual reviews add up quickly. When thousands of alerts turn out to be false positives every month, the wasted effort translates into hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. By filtering them out automatically, Sphinx keeps those costs from ballooning.
– Governance: Every decision (whether closed or escalated) comes with a clear audit trail. That reduces the back-and-forth with auditors and makes it easier to prove controls are working as intended.
The net effect is simple: analysts spend their time on real risk, customers onboard faster, and costs stop escalating just to confirm “no issue.”
Why explainability matters
One of the biggest challenges in using AI for compliance is trust. Regulators, auditors, and even internal teams don’t just want decisions – they want to know why those decisions were made. Sphinx was designed with that in mind.
Every case closed by Sphinx comes with reasoning in plain language, pointing to the specific data or policy rule that led to the outcome. Every escalation is delivered with a short memo that makes it clear why the case deserves human review. And every decision is logged so it can be replayed later if needed.
That explainability turns AI from a “black box” into something that feels like an extra analyst on the team – one that works around the clock.
How many engineering hours?
The Sphinx implementation required no development hours from the Alviere team. Instead, the Sphinx agents work directly on top of Alviere’s existing systems just like a human analyst – logging in with a username and password.
This meant that the go-live didn’t depend on engineering schedules, and every action taken by our AI agent is visible in the UI layer.
The broader impact
Filtering out noise at the start of the process doesn’t just save time and money. It also changes how teams operate day to day. Analysts focus on meaningful cases, RFIs become more targeted, and onboarding feels smoother for customers. Program owners face fewer trade-offs between compliance, growth, and customer experience.
When fraud is accelerating and regulators are watching more closely than ever, those improvements aren’t just operational, they’re strategic.
And the stakes are high: fraud keeps accelerating, and regulatory scrutiny isn’t easing up. The real challenge in AML & KYC isn’t just catching bad actors, it’s keeping teams from drowning in the noise while doing it. With Sphinx, Alviere reduces that noise. Fewer false positives, faster onboarding, lower costs, and traceable decisions that stand up to audit.