Introduction
Sentinel is anti-money laundering (AML) software from Somu Labs. A fintech installs it on its own infrastructure, sends it every transaction through an API, and gets back a decision: allow, review or block, with the reasons.
Around that decision sit the tools a compliance team works in every day: an alert queue with two-person approval, name screening, and an audit log that can't be quietly edited. Case investigations and reports to your Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) are planned.
Why it exists
Any company that moves money has to run an AML programme. A regulator wants to see that you know your customers, watch their transactions, investigate what looks wrong, report what's still suspicious, and keep records that prove it. A fintech that can't show this doesn't get licensed, and banks and payment networks won't connect it.
Large banks have compliance departments and expensive software for this. A young fintech has a few engineers and maybe one compliance officer. Sentinel is the AML programme they can install, integrate in about a day, and show to a regulator.
What it does
| Part | What it does | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring | Gives every transaction an allow, review or block decision in milliseconds, with reasons | Built, for events sent in sync mode |
| Rules | Versioned rules, with backtests and two-person approval before a change goes live | Built. The built-in pack has two rules so far. |
| Alerts | An alert queue grouped by customer, with notes and four-eyes closure | Built |
| Screening | Checks people and businesses against sanctions, PEP and adverse media lists. Potential matches become alerts, and clearing a match takes two people. | Built. Only a synthetic sample list ships; you license real data. |
| Cases | Investigation workspace that groups alerts with evidence and a narrative | Not built yet |
| Reporting | Drafts STRs and CTRs in goAML format, files them and keeps the receipt; builds evidence packs | Not built yet |
| Connectors | Ready-made links to rails and providers: mobile money operators, card processors, bank switches, KYC providers | Not built yet |
| Ledger (optional) | A built-in accounting system for fintechs that don't have one yet | Not built yet |
You can start with one or two parts, usually Screening and Monitoring, and add the rest later. Coming soon lists what the API doesn't do yet.
Sentinel works on any rail: mobile money, cards, bank transfers, instant payments and stablecoins.
Design principles
| Principle | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Your infrastructure | Sentinel runs on-prem or in your own cloud account. Customer data is stored and processed there, never on Somu Labs servers. |
| Explainable | Every decision stores the rules that fired, their versions and the feature values they saw. |
| Fast enough to be inline | The target p99 for a synchronous decision is under 300 ms, so your payment can wait for it. |
| Auditable | Changes to alerts, rules and keys go into an append-only, hash-chained log that anyone can verify. |
| Never breaks payments | Sentinel answers; your systems act. Billing and licensing problems will never stop scoring. |
What it doesn't do
- Check IDs or selfies. That's your identity verification provider's job. Send Sentinel the result.
- Move money. It decides. Your payment system acts on the decision.
- Hold your data. It runs on your infrastructure, so your customer data stays there.
- Make black-box decisions. Every score comes with the rules that produced it.
- Replace your compliance officer. People still make the calls and sign the reports. Sentinel makes them faster and keeps the record.
Who uses it
- Founders and compliance leads buy it to get licensed or approved by a partner.
- Engineers integrate it: send events, read decisions, manage API keys.
- Analysts work in it every day: alerts, cases, reports.
- Reviewers approve alert closures and rule changes, and later case closures and filings.
- Admins run the install and manage keys.
- Regulators and auditors never log in, but they read what it produces.