Silent Eight

Silent Eight is a Singapore-headquartered vendor of AI decisioning software for financial crime compliance, started in Singapore in 2015 through the JFDI.Asia accelerator. Its systems take over the manual review of alerts in sanctions and name screening, AML transaction monitoring and customer due diligence, targeting the very high false-positive volumes that screening generates at international banks.

The Iris platform, released in its seventh version in 2025, runs policy-bound AI agents that read an alert, gather evidence, apply the bank’s own written policy and produce an auditable narrative for each decision. Agents cover customer screening, payment screening, transaction monitoring, adverse media, trade surveillance and expert CDD, with a Case Manager and Risk Data Manager alongside. Standard Chartered was the first major bank to deploy the technology for sanctions compliance in 2018; HSBC became a client in 2021 and HSBC Ventures joined the USD 40m Series B in 2022. Later deployments include First Abu Dhabi Bank, Emirates NBD, Mashreq and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.

1. Iris 7 AI agents: policy-bound agents that close alerts with a written, auditable rationale instead of a score.

2. Screening coverage: separate customer screening and payment screening agents for sanctions, PEP and watchlist hits.

3. Transaction monitoring: a decision agent that triages and dispositions AML monitoring alerts.

4. Adverse media and CDD: agents that assess negative news and complex due diligence cases across languages.

5. Case Manager and Risk Data Manager: investigation workflow and reference data management inside the platform.

6. Tier-one references: deployed at Standard Chartered since 2018, HSBC since 2021, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Emirates NBD and Mashreq.