Financial Services Pilot

Executive Summary

A major financial institution sought to modernize compliance across onboarding, access, sanctions screening, and risk evaluation—reducing false positives, minimizing manual reviews, enforcing uniform sanctions logic, and eliminating redundant KYC while adding explainable AI and minimizing PII retention.

Zekret implemented a sovereign trust architecture inside the bank’s VPC: reusable credentials, structured attestations, unified sanctions + risk intelligence, deterministic policies, real-time enforcement, and governed AI augmentation.

The Challenge

• High false-positive rates in sanctions screening: multiple vendors produced inconsistent results and excessive manual review.
• Repeated document-based KYC: identities re-verified across lines of business.
• Complex regulatory landscape: FATF, AMLD5/6, PSD2, internal eligibility, and sanctions rules.
• AI usage restricted by governance: audit demanded explainability, traceability, and prevention of unfair automated decisions.
• Legacy architecture complexity: siloed systems couldn’t share trust signals without PII exposure.

Why Zekret Was Selected

• ✔ Zero-retention identity aligned with privacy minimization
• ✔ Deterministic sanctions and risk evaluation
• ✔ Explainable AI governance
• ✔ Rapid integration with legacy systems
• ✔ Fit for regulated financial environments
• ✔ Alignment with FATF, AMLD, EU AI Act
• ✔ Non-PII compliance-state for cross-system interoperability

Implementation Overview

1. Identity Credential Deployment: reusable encrypted credential after a single verification; sanctions, age/jurisdiction, documentation validity, KYC/KYB attributes; no PII stored.
2. Sanctions & Risk Intelligence Integration: unified OFAC/UN/EU/HMT plus PEP/watchlists; one canonical compliance-state replacing 3+ siloed systems.
3. Policy Pack Creation: onboarding eligibility, EDD triggers, sanctions thresholds, jurisdictional restrictions, transaction gates—deterministic and auditable.
4. Federated AI Governance Layer: risk/anomaly models deployed inside VPC with explainability traces, policy-constrained outputs, governance logs, zero data egress.
5. Deterministic Enforcement: governs account creation, payment approvals, cross-border transfers, high-risk transactions, and escalations with version-controlled audit trails.

Architecture Used

• Identity Layer: reusable credentials replacing repeated document checks.
• Compliance Intelligence Layer: non-PII sanctions and behavioral risk evaluation.
• Policy Engine: deterministic compliance for all banking workflows.
• AI Governance Layer: explainable on-prem inference for risk augmentation.
• Enforcement Layer: transparent enforcement for onboarding and transactions.
• Deployment Model: Private Cloud/VPC inside the bank perimeter.

Outcomes & Impact

• ↳ 70% reduction in sanctions false positives
• ↳ 65% reduction in repeat KYC processes
• ↳ Deterministic, transparent compliance decisions
• ↳ Sovereign, explainable AI successfully deployed
• ↳ Significant reduction in PII exposure
• ↳ Faster transaction approvals via automated compliance

Metrics (Anonymized)