Sardine vs Unit21 (2026)

Agents are described as integrated with the customer's data and compliance workflows, and they research businesses across registration records, filings, licenses and online sources. The platform returns decisions and routes cases through its own case management, and the customer integrates by calling Sardine through its SDK and API. Sardine's public pages show no catalog of connectors into third party systems and no framework for customers to add tools, and the integration guides sit behind the documentation login.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-aml and docs.sardine.airead 2026-09-06

More than thirty named systems connect across eleven categories. They include core banking (Fiserv DNA, Finxact and Premier, Jack Henry SilverLake and Symitar, Corelation), digital banking (Alkami, Q2, Finastra, NCR), banking as a service (Unit, Treasury Prime), data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Aurora), KYC and KYB providers, watchlists, crypto analytics, device intelligence and check images. Salesforce and Zendesk sync case records and investigation outcomes in both directions, and a proprietary ingestion layer is described as integrating with any tool.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/integrationsread 2026-09-06

Agents are composed for each workflow. Alert reviews run the Doc KYC, PEP Screening, OSINT Search and Sanctions Screening agents together, business verification runs Business Due Diligence, OSINT, Graph Analyst and Doc KYC, and the Data Analyst and Rule Assistant agents pair on rule creation. Rules, workflows and case management route cases and follow ups, and a customer testimonial describes the system triaging alerts, opening cases and routing follow ups automatically. Customers get a rules and workflow builder for this multi agent, multi step work.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-aml and sardine.airead 2026-09-06

Agents run the financial crime lifecycle end to end, from alert triage and evidence gathering through case investigation and entity network expansion, narrative drafting and filing preparation, QA checks against SOP steps and detection improvement. They investigate step by step and take or recommend the workflow action. A task builder lets a team define new agent tasks and workflows configured to its own escalation rules.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Events inside the platform hand work to the agents. Transaction monitoring, sanctions, PEP and KYC alerts generated by the rules engine and screening are handed to the agents for triage, onboarding applications submitted through the customer's integration are reviewed in real time, and rules fire on transactions across onboarding, login and payment flows. Customer testimonials describe alerts handed off automatically in real time. Starts are event driven, from the platform's own detection and the web application. The public pages show no schedule or webhook surface a customer can configure.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-aml and sardine.airead 2026-09-06

The agents pick up alerts raised by the platform's real time detection and transaction monitoring, which they ingest for triage, and data arriving through the ingestion integrations from core banking, payment and warehouse systems. Unit21 describes an alert entering, being investigated and reaching a filing in one environment. There is no schedule or webhook the customer configures.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agent and unit21.ai/integrationsread 2026-09-06

The platform maintains a connections graph mapping relationships between users, devices, IP addresses, phones, emails and transactions that the Graph Analyst Agent queries to surface mule rings and relationships. It also keeps a case store holding customer history and prior findings the agents draw on, and consortium fraud intelligence across billions of devices. These persist, scale past a context window and stay queryable. The OSINT research an agent does for each case is context assembled per run, not a store Sardine keeps.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai and sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-amlread 2026-09-06

Agents investigate over the platform's own data model. They expand entity networks during case investigation, query the alert's own data through the Data Analysis task, and draw on transaction, customer and case history ingested into the platform from core banking, warehouse and KYC systems, a store that persists across alerts and can be queried.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agent and unit21.ai/integrationsread 2026-09-06

Case management centralizes alerts, transactions, customer history, investigation findings and decisions, and agents draw on that history when summarizing a case. That is the application's data model and audit record, not a memory layer. There is no memory with a stated scope and lifetime, and no conversational session state.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-aml and sardine.airead 2026-09-06

Unit21 says dispositions and feedback improve future detection and decisioning over time, which is learning absorbed into its models, not a memory, and the entity networks and case records the agents work over are the platform's data model. There is no agent memory and no conversational session state.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Every alert triage arrives as a disposition recommendation with rationale for human review. Business verification packages findings so analysts approve low risk cases and review higher risk ones, and the SAR agent drafts only if the analyst decides to file. Agents work within defined workflows under structured human oversight, not in place of analyst judgment. The review and approve step sits in Sardine's own case management.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-amlread 2026-09-06

The agents keep a human in the loop by default. Each agent run recommends a close or escalation, or takes the workflow action directly within the guardrails the customer configures. The customer sets when a human must review or approve and configures approval gates, narratives are drafted ready for QA and approval, and every task builder run is approved by a human.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Attestation and control documentation sit in a Vanta security portal at security.sardine.ai. No SSO, RBAC or certification statement appears on the main site or in the public documentation, and the full technical suite is behind a login, so the controls look gated, not absent. No SOC 2 report, SSO or role based access detail is available outside that portal.

Sourcesecurity.sardine.airead 2026-09-06

Unit21 holds SOC 2 Type I and Type II, attested by Armanino, with penetration tests by Doyensec and Cobalt, and states GDPR and CCPA compliance. The access controls it describes are its own, with Auth0 for authentication, MFA required for staff to reach production and logging of staff access to customer data. It does not say how a customer's own users are identified, provisioned or given roles.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/security and unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

There are defensible audit trails at every step, audit ready documentation kept by the agents, a rationale attached to each disposition recommendation, and case summaries that link transactions, alerts, customer history, findings and supporting evidence in one view for governance and regulator review. The public pages show no exportable log of user actions.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-amlread 2026-09-06

Every agent run produces a transparent work log, a trace of every step taken, data accessed, checks performed and assumptions made. The rationale for each recommendation is tied to evidence and policy logic, with a full audit trail of the who, what and why, and the platform traces runs after deployment.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Sardine does not say where customer data is hosted. No hosting provider, region, customer environment option or sub processor list is published on the main site or in the public documentation. A security portal runs at security.sardine.ai.

Sourcesecurity.sardine.airead 2026-09-06

Unit21 encrypts backups and segments its network but names no hosting provider, region or customer environment option, and its documentation is password protected. It does not say where customer data is hosted or whether a region can be chosen.

Sourceunit21.ai/securityread 2026-09-06

Ten prebuilt agents are offered for customers to adopt (OSINT Search, Data Analyst, Rule Assistant, Transaction Monitoring, Business Due Diligence, Doc KYC, PEP Screening, Graph Analyst, Sanctions Screening, SAR Generation), sold as Agentic Fraud Ops and Agentic AML Ops, over a catalog of modular product building blocks across onboarding, fraud prevention, cyber security and AML compliance. Each agent works on its own, so without the SAR Generation Agent the screening and research agents are still whole.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai and sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-amlread 2026-09-06

The products are modules of one platform (transaction monitoring, case management, payment and sanction screening, customer risk rating, regulatory filings), and the Agentic Task Builder lets a team build its own agent tasks in plain English. The agents are configured to each program's SOPs and thresholds, not chosen from a catalog, and Unit21 mentions templates for agent tasks without publishing a catalog.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Sardine does not name the language model behind the agents, and there is no customer or admin model selection or routing across providers on Sardine's side. The platform's own fraud and credit models, which customers can build, test and deploy and, in a testimonial, train, are machine learning tooling, not a choice of the model the agents run on.

SourceSardine, sardine.airead 2026-09-06

Customer data is never used to train Unit21's agents. Unit21 refers to its models without naming a provider, and there is no model selection for customers or admins and no routing across providers.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

Sardine is sold as an API and SDK platform with a developer portal at docs.sardine.ai and a public status page. The documentation covers an API Reference for detecting fraud and risk and integration guides for onboarding users, and the public tier covers getting started, sandbox access and the integration timeline. The full API reference and integration guides sit behind a dashboard login, which is the access path customers use.

SourceSardine, docs.sardine.ai and docs.sardine.ai/llms.txtread 2026-09-06

There is a developer documentation portal at docs.unit21.ai, but it is password protected with no public tier. No API, SDK or MCP server is named for an outside caller to drive the platform. Unit21's proprietary data ingestion and its two way syncing with Salesforce and Zendesk move data in and out but do not let a caller drive the agents.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/integrations and unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

A customer can create, test and roll out transaction monitoring rules on the platform without engineering support, and the Rule Assistant Agent tunes rule thresholds to improve alert quality, fire rates and monitoring coverage. That evaluates a change to the customer's detection logic against measured outcomes before and after release, on Sardine's own surface.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-amlread 2026-09-06

Unit21 answers model risk with evaluation before deployment and tracing after it. In the task builder a team tests a new agent task against a real alert and sees the actual output before saving it, detection improvements are recommended from outcomes with validation, and implementation validates a workflow in parallel before expanding it.

Every agent is backtested against historical alerts already reviewed by experts before it touches a live queue, accuracy is measured against a golden set of alerts the customer's best analysts have already dispositioned, and once live a team can sample agreement and disagreement cases at random.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06

The OSINT Search Agent searches online sources, social media and public databases at run time for each alert or case, so the agent does its own web research instead of drawing on a prebuilt index. Sardine does not say what mechanism it uses. The device intelligence and behavior biometrics SDK runs inside the customer's own application, which is the product running in a browser, not an agent operating one, and bot detection detects agentic automation instead of performing it. There is no browser, desktop or computer control that the agent drives.

SourceSardine, sardine.ai/agentic-ai-for-aml and sardine.airead 2026-09-06

The Agentic Task Builder's Online Search task runs the external research a team describes, for example checking an entity and connected businesses for adverse media or sanctions exposure, at run time against live alerts, and returns a verdict with sources. Unit21 does not say how the search runs, and there is no browser, desktop or computer control.

SourceUnit21, unit21.ai/products/ai-agentread 2026-09-06