How BVNK Built a Scalable Compliance Stack with Sumsub

BVNK is a payments infrastructure provider that enables businesses to move, hold, and convert fiat and digital assets globally. Built on stablecoin-native technology, the platform supports fintechs, payment institutions, crypto-native companies, and embedded finance platforms that require compliant account issuance and transaction capabilities.

Operating globally, BVNK has hub offices in London, San Francisco, New York, Cape Town, Malta, and Sofia, supporting its international client base across key financial markets.

By combining traditional and digital asset infrastructure, BVNK helps clients operate across multiple markets while maintaining the regulatory standards required for modern financial services.

The Challenge

As BVNK scaled its global payments and embedded finance offering, its existing verification setup became increasingly difficult to maintain. Onboarding processes were fragmented across multiple tools and teams, and a significant portion of verification relied on manual work.

For business customers, company verification was largely handled manually, while identity checks for associated individuals had limited automation. Document quality controls also varied across regions, making it harder to maintain consistent standards.

This led to several operational challenges:

• Long onboarding cycles for higher-risk customers and multi-entity business structures
• A growing manual review workload for compliance analysts
• Limited ability to scale partner-driven onboarding without adding more people
• Limited automation in address verification, sanctions screening, and risk signals
• Increasing pressure to meet regulatory expectations across core markets such as the EU, UK, and US

As BVNK expanded its embedded onboarding models, it became clear that a more scalable, API-first verification platform was needed. The company required a solution that could support both individual and business verification while giving its compliance team more control over policies, workflows, and automation.

Why Sumsub?

BVNK evaluated several providers before selecting Sumsub. A key factor was Sumsub’s API-first architecture, which fit well with BVNK’s embedded and partner-facing use cases. The team needed a solution that could integrate smoothly into different onboarding models while supporting consistent verification outcomes across direct and partner-led flows.

Another important advantage was the ability to handle both individual and business verification within a single platform. This gave BVNK a more unified setup for onboarding complex customer structures without relying on separate tools.

Several capabilities stood out during the selection process:

1. Liveness detection and anti-spoofing controls for higher-risk segments
2. Reusable Identity solution that could be integrated into partner onboarding flows
3. Configurable risk scoring, rules, and workflow logic aligned with BVNK’s risk appetite
4. Broad global document coverage to support an international customer base

Georgios Arvanitidis

Senior Product Manager, Onboarding at BVNK

For BVNK, reusable verification components and flexible workflows were especially important. Partner-led onboarding requires that identity checks can be orchestrated cleanly through API-driven flows, with consistent outcomes regardless of whether the end customer is onboarded directly by BVNK or via a partner.

The Solution

With Sumsub, BVNK restructured its onboarding journeys across both direct and partner-led models, creating a more unified setup for individual and business verification, supported by Sumsub’s KYC, KYB, and AML Transaction Monitoring capabilities.

Customer information is submitted either through a direct BVNK integration or through a partner, after which the necessary consent and regulatory disclosures are collected. Sumsub then triggers the relevant verification flow, depending on whether the customer is an individual or a business.

From there, the platform runs a set of automated checks, including:

• Document verification
• Liveness check if required
• AML Screening using global watchlists, sanctions, PEPs and adverse media
• Business registry checks and company data enrichment

Once these checks are completed, configurable risk scoring is applied based on BVNK’s own rules and risk appetite. Verification results and key risk indicators are then surfaced in BVNK’s internal tools to support decision-making. Transaction Monitoring adds an ongoing layer of oversight, extending compliance beyond onboarding and giving teams better visibility into customer activity over time.

This setup helped BVNK address several of its core operational pain points:

• Less manual document and data validation for both personal and business checks
• More consistent quality controls across markets and onboarding types
• Higher automation and more straight-through approvals for clear low-risk cases
• More consistent treatment of similar customers across direct and partner-led flows
• A stronger audit trail and clearer case history for regulatory reviews and internal quality assurance

By centralizing verification logic in Sumsub and integrating it closely into its own orchestration layer, BVNK can now support higher onboarding volumes and more complex customer profiles without a proportional increase in operational workload.

Implementation

From a technical perspective, the integration with Sumsub was straightforward. Sumsub’s platform aligned well with BVNK’s architecture, and flexible workflow configuration allowed the compliance team to encode policy without relying on constant engineering changes. Documentation, sandbox environments, and dedicated support from Sumsub also helped the team test, refine, and tailor flows to BVNK’s risk profile and target regions.

The Results

Since implementing Sumsub, BVNK has seen measurable improvements across onboarding speed, automation, and internal efficiency.

For standard-risk business customers, onboarding time has been reduced by around 40 to 50%. In many cases, this means moving from several days to roughly one to two days, provided that complete documentation is submitted from the start.

For low- and medium-risk individual checks in key markets, automated approvals now reach 90 to 95%. At the same time, manual review workload has decreased by approximately 30 to 40%, allowing compliance analysts to spend less time on routine document validation and focus more on genuinely high-risk or complex cases.

Georgios Arvanitidis

Senior Product Manager, Onboarding at BVNK

We now see more consistent document handling, fewer edge cases requiring escalation, and much less back-and-forth with customers thanks to clearer requirements early in the flow. At the same time, manual workload has decreased by 30-40%, allowing our teams to focus on higher-risk cases.

Operational outcomes

Beyond the measurable gains in speed and automation, BVNK has also seen broader operational improvements:

• Faster customer activation and shorter time-to-revenue.
• Reduced cost per onboarded customer, despite growing regulatory demands.
• A smoother and more predictable onboarding experience for partners and their end customers.
• Greater confidence in scaling partner-led onboarding without proportional headcount growth.

Collaboration benefits

The impact has also been visible internally, especially in the way Product and Compliance work together:

• Stronger alignment through a shared verification framework
• Clearer decisions on where friction should be added or removed in the onboarding journey
• More structured testing of thresholds and additional controls
• Less ambiguity and fewer one-off exceptions in onboarding decisions
• More efficient collaboration and more transparent, repeatable decision-making

Georgios Arvanitidis

Senior Product Manager, Onboarding at BVNK

By bringing together KYC, KYB, AML screening, and transaction monitoring in one platform, we were able to move from fragmented onboarding to a unified, scalable compliance setup. That helped us cut onboarding time for both end users and businesses, reduce manual workload, and give our teams better visibility into risk, without adding operational complexity.

Future plans

BVNK continues to work with Sumsub to further evolve its onboarding capabilities as its products and market footprint expand. The next phase focuses on increasing flexibility and automation across onboarding flows, including expanding the use of non-document verification methods where regulations and risk appetite allow. The team is also working to further optimize reusable identity capabilities to better support partner-led onboarding models and reduce duplication across flows.

At the same time, BVNK plans to deepen automation and data enrichment for more complex business structures that span multiple jurisdictions, while supporting expansion into new markets with localized checks and risk rules. Across all of these initiatives, the priority remains the same: reducing onboarding friction for end customers while maintaining, and where necessary strengthening, regulatory compliance standards.