Vaultline was building a next-generation compliance platform for mid-market financial institutions — banks, credit unions, and broker-dealers with $500M-$10B in assets. These institutions faced the same regulatory requirements as the largest banks but had a fraction of the compliance staff. The compliance landscape was complex: BSA/AML monitoring, KYC verification, SAR filing, OFAC screening, and dozens of other regulatory requirements that changed frequently. Existing solutions were either enterprise-grade (priced for JPMorgan, not a $2B credit union) or basic checkbox tools that didn't actually reduce compliance risk. Vaultline had raised a $7M Series A and needed to deliver a production platform within 12 months. The platform needed to integrate with core banking systems, handle sensitive financial data with bank-grade security, and provide the audit trails that regulators expected.

We architected the platform around a compliance rules engine that could express regulatory requirements as configurable policies. This meant that when regulations changed (which happened frequently), the compliance team could update rules without engineering releases. The transaction monitoring module used a combination of rule-based detection and anomaly detection to identify suspicious activity. We built a case management workflow that guided compliance officers through the investigation process, automatically assembling relevant evidence and pre-populating SAR forms. KYC verification was handled through a multi-provider integration layer that could route verification requests to different providers based on risk level, geography, and cost. The system maintained a unified identity graph that connected verification results across providers. For core banking integration, we built a connector framework that supported the major core banking platforms (FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry) through standardized adapters. Each adapter handled the vendor-specific APIs while producing normalized data for the compliance engine. Security was paramount: we implemented end-to-end encryption, hardware security module integration for key management, and a zero-trust network architecture. The entire platform was designed to operate within the institution's VPC, with no customer data leaving their environment.