October 22, 2026
Different is better than better
There is no one in finance who thinks that our current approach to stopping financial crime is working.
Banks feel they’re spending too much time and money while merely scratching the surface of what their compliance operations could accomplish. Analysts feel that they are not empowered to actually go after the bad guys. Government agents are drowning in prophylactic reports, signal buried in noise. And still, somehow, criminals launder a couple trillion dollars a year through the global financial system.
It’s possible that as recently as a few years ago, someone could have said that we were doing the best we could—at least within the constraints of consumer privacy, imperfect data and limited resources. After all, the regulatory standard is for an effective financial crimes program, not a perfect one.
No one today could come to this conclusion.
For the better part of the last 15 years, I’ve been in conversations with dozens of startups trying to fix this system and always the fixes came down to three holy grail ideas.
- We must leverage the tools and data sources this industry already trusts and relies on in a centralized way.
- We must use technology and intelligence to achieve perpetual, true understanding of customers and transactions.
- We must develop an efficient way to draw from an institution’s historical context to improve its go-forward decisions and processes.
Though the words we used to describe these technologies changed, the ideas never waivered. Like many things in fintech, we understood the challenge before us and we knew our mission, but the technology and insights to achieve that mission weren’t quite there yet.
Until now.
From my first conversation with Eli Wachs at Footprint, I could tell that this was not just one more identity and fraud company. Most importantly, Eli and Alex Grinman could clearly articulate why previous efforts hadn’t achieved their goals.
They had built their company differently than others. As Alex explained, the very first thing they built was a vault to securely store consumer data. Every financial company needs to do two contradictory things: they need to collect significant amounts of personally identifiable information AND they need to strictly limit access to that information.
Alex and Eli saw that there were many companies that had earned the right to help you gather the information, and others that had earned the right to help you store it and control it securely. But no one had earned the right do both.
Moreover, they saw that if a company could earn the right to do both, they would be in a position to achieve all three of the holy grail missions above.
And then AI…
What we realized only later is that agentic workflows are a natural extension—and completion—of this technology cycle.
Yes, Footprint can help you gather the information you need from your customers, but only its synchronous AI agents can figure out what additional questions should be asked as you go through onboarding.
Yes, Footprint helps you complete investigations and clear review backlog faster, but only its AI infra gives your institution a comprehensive memory of the learnings from it. Every bank already knows an enormous amount—that knowledge sits in thousands of closed investigations, in the dispositions analysts reached and in the reasons they reached them. Without purpose-built intelligence however, none of it compounds. Footprint has built an AI-powered institutional layer that remembers every prior decision, and uses that memory to make the next decision better—and the policy behind it better, too.
Architecture is destiny
Everyone wants to be a “first principles” thinker, but the future is uncertain. It requires quite a combination of luck and skill to use those first principles to make smart data architecture and business model choices.
The best companies find that those early choices enable just the right balance between speed and optionality. Other founders lose months on refactoring or years beating their heads against the wall of new customer types when they realize that they never earned the right to expand their TAM.
Footprint’s approach to security and commitment to linking digital footprints with unique human identities has now positioned them to act differently than their peers.
Whereas others are automating the investigation process with AI, Footprint is able to weave investigations into the onboarding process itself. Where others use their AI agents to create queues for customer follow-up, Footprint’s agentic system is able to draw from trusted data sources to close the loop, and commit the judgment call to memory.
This is the difference between automating a task and reimagining a function. Most of the category is asking how to close an alert faster. The better question—the one you would ask if you were designing a bank’s financial crimes operation from scratch today—is what the operation is actually for. Not how quickly we investigate, but how we come to understand a customer continuously, how we stop the money before it moves and how every decision we make leaves the next one smarter.
Different is better than better
The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Many financial institutions aren’t ready to move to a fully automated investigations platform. They prefer the security of and trust of real humans—on their own teams or in business process outsourcing and staffing firms.
Some AI-native startups are embracing this reality by building their own outsourcing functions. Footprint is different. For customers that want humans in the loop, Footprint has already partnered with top financial crimes consultants to give their clients the best of both worlds.
My favorite line of the summer was from a founder who told me that “different is better than better.” He said he wasn’t trying to be a better version of another company, he was trying to organize his approach in a different way.
Security first. Humans in partnership. Architected to eliminate, not to automate.
These are the different choices Footprint has made. That’s the vision of something that will finally make a real difference in financial crime.
We couldn’t be happier to double down with Eli, Alex and the whole Footprint team.
There is no one in finance who thinks that our current approach to stopping financial crime is working.
Banks feel they’re spending too much time and money while merely scratching the surface of what their compliance operations could accomplish. Analysts feel that they are not empowered to actually go after the bad guys. Government agents are drowning in prophylactic reports, signal buried in noise. And still, somehow, criminals launder a couple trillion dollars a year through the global financial system.
It’s possible that as recently as a few years ago, someone could have said that we were doing the best we could—at least within the constraints of consumer privacy, imperfect data and limited resources. After all, the regulatory standard is for an effective financial crimes program, not a perfect one.
No one today could come to this conclusion.
For the better part of the last 15 years, I’ve been in conversations with dozens of startups trying to fix this system and always the fixes came down to three holy grail ideas.
- We must leverage the tools and data sources this industry already trusts and relies on in a centralized way.
- We must use technology and intelligence to achieve perpetual, true understanding of customers and transactions.
- We must develop an efficient way to draw from an institution’s historical context to improve its go-forward decisions and processes.
Though the words we used to describe these technologies changed, the ideas never waivered. Like many things in fintech, we understood the challenge before us and we knew our mission, but the technology and insights to achieve that mission weren’t quite there yet.
Until now.
From my first conversation with Eli Wachs at Footprint, I could tell that this was not just one more identity and fraud company. Most importantly, Eli and Alex Grinman could clearly articulate why previous efforts hadn’t achieved their goals.
They had built their company differently than others. As Alex explained, the very first thing they built was a vault to securely store consumer data. Every financial company needs to do two contradictory things: they need to collect significant amounts of personally identifiable information AND they need to strictly limit access to that information.
Alex and Eli saw that there were many companies that had earned the right to help you gather the information, and others that had earned the right to help you store it and control it securely. But no one had earned the right do both.
Moreover, they saw that if a company could earn the right to do both, they would be in a position to achieve all three of the holy grail missions above.
And then AI…
What we realized only later is that agentic workflows are a natural extension—and completion—of this technology cycle.
Yes, Footprint can help you gather the information you need from your customers, but only its synchronous AI agents can figure out what additional questions should be asked as you go through onboarding.
Yes, Footprint helps you complete investigations and clear review backlog faster, but only its AI infra gives your institution a comprehensive memory of the learnings from it. Every bank already knows an enormous amount—that knowledge sits in thousands of closed investigations, in the dispositions analysts reached and in the reasons they reached them. Without purpose-built intelligence however, none of it compounds. Footprint has built an AI-powered institutional layer that remembers every prior decision, and uses that memory to make the next decision better—and the policy behind it better, too.
Architecture is destiny
Everyone wants to be a “first principles” thinker, but the future is uncertain. It requires quite a combination of luck and skill to use those first principles to make smart data architecture and business model choices.
The best companies find that those early choices enable just the right balance between speed and optionality. Other founders lose months on refactoring or years beating their heads against the wall of new customer types when they realize that they never earned the right to expand their TAM.
Footprint’s approach to security and commitment to linking digital footprints with unique human identities has now positioned them to act differently than their peers.
Whereas others are automating the investigation process with AI, Footprint is able to weave investigations into the onboarding process itself. Where others use their AI agents to create queues for customer follow-up, Footprint’s agentic system is able to draw from trusted data sources to close the loop, and commit the judgment call to memory.
This is the difference between automating a task and reimagining a function. Most of the category is asking how to close an alert faster. The better question—the one you would ask if you were designing a bank’s financial crimes operation from scratch today—is what the operation is actually for. Not how quickly we investigate, but how we come to understand a customer continuously, how we stop the money before it moves and how every decision we make leaves the next one smarter.
Different is better than better
The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Many financial institutions aren’t ready to move to a fully automated investigations platform. They prefer the security of and trust of real humans—on their own teams or in business process outsourcing and staffing firms.
Some AI-native startups are embracing this reality by building their own outsourcing functions. Footprint is different. For customers that want humans in the loop, Footprint has already partnered with top financial crimes consultants to give their clients the best of both worlds.
My favorite line of the summer was from a founder who told me that “different is better than better.” He said he wasn’t trying to be a better version of another company, he was trying to organize his approach in a different way.
Security first. Humans in partnership. Architected to eliminate, not to automate.
These are the different choices Footprint has made. That’s the vision of something that will finally make a real difference in financial crime.
We couldn’t be happier to double down with Eli, Alex and the whole Footprint team.