Alexandre Berkovic

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The "compliance as a cost center" era is officially dying.

I spent the last week talking to CCOs at three different growth-stage fintechs. Different products, different markets, same realization:

The old playbook—hiring 50 analysts to manually review every flag—doesn't just cost too much. It's too slow to survive.

When your product team is shipping features every two weeks, but your compliance review takes ten days, you don't have a "risk" problem. You have a growth problem.

1/ Moving from "Check-the-box" to "Outcome-based." Regulators are starting to care more about whether your system actually catches bad actors than whether you followed a 200-page SOP.

2/ The "Engineer-led" compliance team. The most effective teams I see right now aren't just lawyers. They are teams where the compliance lead can talk API documentation with the CTO.

3/ Automation as a defensive moat. If you can onboard a customer in 30 seconds while your competitor takes 3 days because of manual KYB, you win. Period.

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We're building Sphinx for the teams that realize compliance is a product feature, not a hurdle.

If you're tired of your compliance stack feeling like it was built in 2005, we should talk.

P.S. We're hosting a small dinner for fintech founders in SF next month. DM me if you want a seat.

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