The problem
Cross-border payouts fail at the seams between the systems that screen them.
The industry treats compliance, judgment, and rules as separate concerns. Anton treats them as architectural peers.
Compliance is bolted on.
Every other payments platform treats sanctions screening, risk scoring, and AI as separate vendors stitched together. Each layer fails differently, and the gaps are where money laundering happens.
Decisions aren't reproducible.
When a regulator asks why a transaction was approved on March 14, most platforms can't reconstruct the data state. They show policy. Anton shows evidence — pinned to a versioned snapshot.
Rules can't read context.
Velocity caps catch velocity. Sanctions lists catch sanctioned entities. Neither catches a coherent-looking application that's a shell company or a clean-looking transaction with a fabricated invoice. That's where Anton Intelligence lives.
The triad
Three peer systems. Same event.
Three independent verdicts.
Anton Intelligence is built around three peer evaluators. Each is first-class. None is subordinate. They fire in parallel on every event — every onboarding, every transaction, every payee, every instrument, every overnight monitoring pass.
Sentinel
The Witness
Regulatory truth · entity graph
Screens every counterparty, instrument, and identity against the global watchlist universe and a 4.27M-actor canonical entity graph. Speaks the language of governments.
- Sanctions lists across every jurisdiction Anton serves
- PEPs, RCAs, and political-exposure tiering
- Crime, wanted, debarment, export-control topics
- Crypto wallet addresses on regulatory blocklists
Brain
The Judge
AI evaluation · pattern recognition
The reasoning layer. Reads the full context of an event — merchant history, payee patterns, instrument behavior, narrative signals — and renders judgments no rules engine could.
- Multimodal context evaluation
- Anomaly detection across merchant, payee, and corridor
- Pattern recognition no rule can encode
- Adverse media interpretation and entity linking
Engine
The Arbiter
Deterministic rules · velocity · risk
The rules layer. Every velocity threshold, every corridor risk weight, every TRS/ORS feature combination runs here. Reproducible, fast, fully explainable.
- TRS — Transaction Risk Score, per-event
- ORS — Onboarding Risk Score, per-merchant
- 24+ velocity rules with rolling windows
- Corridor, instrument, payee risk weighting
The trust mesh
Every merchant on Anton makes every other merchant harder to defraud.
Anton fingerprints every payee, every account, every card, every wallet that touches the platform — one-way SHA-256, never reversible, never shared with merchants. The triad reads the cross-merchant pattern and reasons about it before money moves.
Each merchant's coloured radial — the channel its events travel down to reach Anton at the centre.
A privacy-preserving link between two merchants. Anonymous fingerprints, no raw data — twenty-eight in total.
A single event moving through the mesh in real time. Anton sees every one; merchants only see the verdicts.
Property 01
One-way fingerprints.
SHA-256 cannot be inverted. Anton holds the hash; Basis Theory holds the raw value. The fingerprint cannot be reversed into an account number, a PAN, a name, or a passport.
Property 02
The triad sees patterns, not parties.
When Brain or Engine reasons about cross-merchant exposure, the payload says band=elevated — never which other merchants. There is no surface that returns that mapping to anyone.
Property 03
Industry profiles soften the signal.
Marketplaces expect high payee co-occurrence. Direct merchants do not. Band boundaries tune per industry so legitimate marketplace mechanics aren't flagged as suspicious behavior.
The architecture
One event in. Three verdicts. One decision. Always recorded.
Every state-changing event flows through Anton Intelligence — three peer evaluators working in parallel. The API fans the event in. Three independent verdicts return. The orchestrator synthesizes one of four decisions. Audit captures everything.
01 · ENTRY
API receives, authenticates, idempotency-protects.
02 · EVALUATION
Triad fires in parallel. Peers never wait on each other.
03 · SYNTHESIS
Orchestrator weights three verdicts, picks one of four.
04 · EVIDENCE
Decision + triad responses persist, snapshot-pinned.
Decision outcomes
Four ways every event can resolve.
The orchestrator never returns a raw score. It returns one of four states with full triad evidence attached, written to the audit log, dispatched to the right consumer.
Approve
decision = approve
All three triad members cleared within policy thresholds. The event proceeds with the full triad evaluation pinned to the audit trail.
Review · Automatic
decision = review_auto
Triad disagreement or borderline scores trigger a higher-rigor re-evaluation — more compute, deeper graph, adversarial rule set. The system resolves itself without human time.
Review · Manual
decision = review_manual
The event lands in the ops review queue with the full triad evidence rendered. Compliance, underwriting, or rail-ops makes the call. Their decision becomes labeled training data.
Fail
decision = fail
Hard block. At least one triad member returned a definitive block-grade finding. Merchant notified, event halted, immutable audit entry written.
What merchants see
Inside Anton: the triad. To merchants: five layers of scoring.
The triad is how Anton thinks. The five layers — TRS, ORS, transaction monitoring, anomaly detection, graph intelligence — are how the triad's decisions surface back to your dashboard, your reason codes, your reconciliation feed.
inside / outside
Inside the API
- Sentinel · regulatory truth
- Brain · AI judgment
- Engine · deterministic rules
- Trust mesh · cross-merchant signal
- Orchestrator · synthesis
Surfaced to merchants
- TRS · transaction risk score
- ORS · onboarding risk score
- TM · transaction monitoring
- AD · anomaly detection
- GI · graph intelligence