Kevin D. Kim | Portfolio

Modern Treasury

Compliance

A native compliance product extending Modern Treasury’s payments platform, enabling customers to onboard users, verify identities, and monitor transactions within a single system.

Role

Design Lead

Timeline

Q1 2022

Sector

Compliance

Scope

0 → 1 MVP

SUMMARY

Building a Compliance Layer to Scale Payments Safely

Background

Modern Treasury powered money movement at scale, but customers relied on fragmented third-party tools for KYC, KYB, and AML. This created operational risk, manual workflows, and limited visibility beyond the payments layer.

To support enterprise adoption, Modern Treasury needed a native compliance system that worked seamlessly with payments while meeting regulatory and operational requirements.

Outcome

I led the design of a new compliance product line that enabled customer onboarding, case review and approval, and transaction monitoring directly within Modern Treasury.

The platform became a foundational extension of payments, improving onboarding speed, auditability, and enterprise readiness while unlocking a new product surface for the business.

Thanks to

Eric Greenstein (PM), Julien Chien (Eng), Houman Farokhzad (Eng), Mafaz Chaudhry (Eng)

PROBLEM

PAYMENTS AT SCALE WITHOUT A COMPLIANCE FOUNDATION

Customers could move money with Modern Treasury, but compliance lived outside the platform. Onboarding, case review, and risk monitoring relied on fragmented third-party tools that didn’t scale with enterprise needs.

The challenge was to design a native compliance system that matched the rigor of payments, accurate, auditable, and deeply integrated, without slowing down critical financial operations.

Constraints

SHAPED BY REAL ENTERPRISE COMPLIANCE WORKFLOWS

The Compliance platform was designed alongside early enterprise customers, whose real-world workflows surfaced strict constraints around verification, review, and auditability.

Splitwise

Needed to onboard large volumes of end users through KYC/KYB without introducing friction or manual bottlenecks—requiring flexible flows that handled edge cases and surfaced ambiguity for review.

Gusto

Required strong controls to review, approve, and audit compliance decisions tied directly to financial activity—demanding clear case states, decision history, and traceability across users and transactions.

CROSS-CUSTOMER CONSTRAINTS

Across customers, compliance had to be first-class: verification and transaction risk built into core workflows, human review where automation failed, complete auditability, and tight integration with payments to prevent siloed risk signals.

Solution

Designing a Native Compliance Layer for Payments

Instead of relying on fragmented third-party tools, we built a native compliance layer inside Modern Treasury to support onboarding, review, and transaction monitoring which is fully integrated with payments.