About
Equals is a global financial management platform that enables businesses to send, track, and control payments and expenses from a single multi-currency account. The platform processes over $50B annually through direct B2B and consumer banking services, as well as white-label and API-embedded payment infrastructure for third-party fintechs and platforms.
Challenge
Routine Compliance Checks Consumed Analyst Bandwidth
Through its API and white-label solutions, Equals gives businesses the tools to offer branded financial products — without having to build the underlying infrastructure from scratch. As the licensed payments provider behind its customers’ offerings, Equals conducts KYC and AML checks to uphold the highest level of compliance. This standard provides customers with access to top-tier payment networks and enables a fast, reliable end-user experience.
For Lauren Mercer, Product Manager at Equals, turning routine compliance reviews into a quick, low-friction process was a top priority. Equals serves customers across a range of industries, often with non-standard user profiles and screening requirements. Before each one went live, Equals’ analysts had to manually verify users’ identities and financial crime risk. At scale, this created substantial overhead, especially for customers with large user bases.
“Our business is growing fast,” explains Lauren. “Manual compliance checks for our indirect customers couldn’t keep up with the new wave of opportunities in our pipeline.”
The workload compounded when reviews flagged legitimate users for RFIs and further investigation. Industry-wide, false positives account for roughly 95% of these cases. Yet, like most regulated providers, Equals had few reliable ways to filter them out.
This left little bandwidth for complex, high-risk reviews that required analysts’ expertise. With repetitive document verification creating significant cognitive load, they also had to slow down or take frequent breaks to maintain accuracy.
The impact didn’t stop at the compliance team. Equals has built its reputation on the speed and rigor of its onboarding. To uphold that standard, routine compliance checks had to keep pace.
Equals had already started overhauling its onboarding process to reduce manual reviews, but getting the new process into production couldn’t happen overnight. When a major customer with thousands of end users approached Equals, Lauren realized her team would need strategic support to meet their onboarding deadline and deliver on their customer commitments.
With priorities clear and executive buy-in from James Simcox, Equals’ Chief Operations & Product Officer, she set out to find a compliance solution that would integrate quickly and efficiently. The right partner would automate routine KYC checks, helping scale compliance capacity in step with the company’s growth.
When James discovered Sphinx, the fit was apparent. The platform’s AI compliance agents were built to work alongside compliance teams, handling routine volume at speed while preserving due diligence quality.
Solution
Compliance Automation That Scales With the Business
Lauren and her team integrated Sphinx into Equals’ setup in just a few clicks, maximizing the time available for user screening before their major customer’s upcoming go‑live.
Working closely with the Sphinx team, Lauren and her team reviewed the AI agents’ decisions for dozens of platform users, aligning their logic with Equals’ SOPs. This calibration ensured Sphinx’s outputs reflected the company’s strict risk controls, building the confidence for a team-wide rollout.
From there, Sphinx’s AI agents started screening Equals’ queue. Built to mirror human processes, they log into the system to assess document authenticity and validity.
With this automation, Lauren’s team reduces hours of routine checks to minutes and preserves analyst attention for high‑risk cases that require human judgment.
When applications need additional information, Sphinx handles the RFI process end-to-end. Equals’ analysts step in when the agent flags a potential true positive, maintaining full oversight with minimal lift.
To improve accuracy over time, Lauren and her team feed edge cases back into the system as new decision rules. When Equals’ analysts identified a set of duplicate applications with a font inconsistency as fraudulent, Sphinx adjusted the agent’s model to capture similar cases going forward.
This flexibility extends to more complex screening tasks. For instance, Equals configured Sphinx to manage source-of-funds verification for its high-risk applicants. These checks eliminate the need to manually compare income against transaction data, ensuring high accuracy without the overhead.
Every decision, whether closed or escalated, is logged with traceable reasoning, ensuring Equals is always ready for internal reviews and regulatory inquiries.
With routine KYC and AML checks automated, customers go live faster and their end users onboard with minimal compliance friction. Meanwhile, Equals confidently takes on more high-volume customers.
“With Sphinx, we feel like we have two new team members who never clock out. We onboarded them the same way we would any analyst, and they hit the ground running.”
— Lauren Mercer, PM at Equals
Results
Equals Processes Cases 7.7x Faster With Sphinx
With Sphinx, Equals has an always-on compliance engine to onboard customers fast and keep analysts focused on high-stakes cases.
The results:
- 87.3% average straight-through processing rate for Sphinx-screened cases
- 7.7x faster case processing with Sphinx for cases handled by Sphinx
- 2061 applications handled in one day by Sphinx
- 293 applications handled in one hour by Sphinx
Looking ahead, Lauren plans to extend Sphinx into Equals’ KYB workflows, a particularly time-consuming task for her team. By mapping complex ownership chains, Sphinx will accelerate the company’s business onboarding and unlock new growth opportunities.
“Sphinx handles the straightforward, high-volume work around the clock so our compliance team can focus on what they’re actually trained to do.”
— Lauren Mercer, PM at Equals