June 02, 2026
Reimagining AML compliance for high-growth companies with Plaid Monitor
Across industries, Plaid’s customers are growing faster than ever before. The average time for a Plaid customer to hit a million users onboarded has dropped by 33% which corresponds to nearly a full year faster. This applies to our customers across fintech, prediction markets, and agentic finance.
With every company growing faster and faster, you have to keep up. More and more money is being spent on marketing, product development, and sales. Unfortunately, in the backend, compliance teams are being overrun by hundreds of new users every day and each one needs a manual review where the cost of failure is in the millions of dollars.
An increasing tax on company growth
As we worked with our customers, we noticed a realization: our fastest growing customers all had the largest backlogs. The faster you grow, the more resources your team has to spend on training new compliance hires on tedious watchlist checks.
As you post your launch video of your brand new product, your company blows up on X and customers sign up in droves, but your compliance team gets a 10,000 user increase in their backlog in a single day. These 10,000 users won’t get to access your product for a month. Not to mention they’re already at a higher risk of churn now and can be vocal critics of your platform.
Each 1% in growth rate wasn’t just an increase in users but in fact a rapid increase in both AML backlog and another compliance team member that you need to onboard.
Overcoming the 30 day period
This backlog can’t just be solved in a single day, instead your compliance team struggles with the operations of managing a review queue that never really empties. The average time for a good user (false positive watchlist case) to be in a customer’s watchlist backlog is nearly 30 days.
Beyond just the number of false positives, it’s difficult to handle the manual triage, context switching, and poor auditability. All of these issues are then compounded with the false positives from the “John Smith’s” around the world. We’re in an environment where companies are growing faster than ever, with lower head counts. Even worse, due to increasing global tensions, the number of individuals and entities added to sanctions lists has increased 30% over the past two years.
This is the problem we've solved with our new Monitor redesign. We didn’t change what Monitor does – the matching algorithm, the watchlist coverage, and the automated rescanning are all still there and still best in class. Instead, we’ve reimagined an AML compliance program for the world where billion dollar companies can be built by just 10 employees.
What’s new in Monitor
How we safely speed up a compliance process
We started from the ground up – counting every click in the flow. Making a decision on a watchlist hit required multiple clicks to gather context on lists flagged, what the match level was, what the current case status showed. We then had a single goal: decrease the number of clicks to as close as zero while still keeping a world class AML experience.
The new dashboard brings all of it into a single view:
The left panel displays the full pending queue, where analysts can filter by what's assigned to them, what is unassigned, or everything in the queue.
The top card surfaces the individual or entity and the review status
The cards below show the current hit count and relevant watchlist matches at a glance.
A persistent decision review widget stays visible throughout, so analysts can leave a comment and submit without losing their place.
This creates a higher analyst productivity and a better case management experience. For a team working through high volumes daily, fewer clicks per case makes a big impact — and clearer confirmation means fewer duplicate reviews eating into capacity.
When it comes to risk configurations, Plaid Monitor still allows you to configure program templates based on your risk tolerance levels. All program templates are still in one spot, but are now clearly organized by individual programs and entity programs.
What Monitor still does well
The dashboard design is new and optimized for efficient case management. But the foundational value of Monitor remains intact:
One tool, every major sanctions list covered
Monitor screens customers against one of the broadest sets of global watchlists available to achieve AML compliance — OFAC, PEP lists, EU, UK, Australian, Canadian, and UN consolidated sanctions, Interpol Red Notices, and more — all updated daily.
A single view of identity and risk
Unlike standalone sanctions screening tools that require a separate identity verification vendor, Monitor integrates natively with Plaid Identity Verification — giving your team a single, unified view of both identity and watchlist status. This not only addresses KYC compliance and customer due diligence needs, but creates a faster ramp for new analysts: one mental model for configuring KYC, AML, and fraud workflows.
Accurate signal, less noise
The matching algorithm handles phonetic variations, transliteration across 21 languages, nicknames and aliases, and semantically similar names across scripts — keeping analysts focused on higher-risk alerts rather than chasing noise.
Always-on monitoring, audit trail included
Daily automated rescans that cover your entire customer base without manual rescreening workflows – scaling to over 100 million users without performance degradation. When a new hit is found, your team is alerted via webhook in real time. Every decision is captured in a persistent audit trail — including workflows, user roles, and secondary review configurations — so you’re ready for regulatory examination.
Get started
AML compliance operations can get buried under operational friction that compounds as teams and customer bases grow. The updated Monitor dashboard is built to remove that friction — so the analysts you have can do more, and the decisions they make are better supported.
If you're already using Monitor, the new dashboard is live now. Log in to see the updated review experience and explore the new case management settings.
If you're not using Monitor yet, we'd like to show you what it looks like in practice. Talk to our team or get started today.