Turning the Tide: How Hummingbird is Transforming Compliance and the Fight Against Financial Crime

What Hummingbird does

Hummingbird helps financial institutions do more in their fight against financial crime, maximizing efficiency and managing risk with fast, flexible, and intelligent compliance tools.

The Current Landscape and Hummingbird

Compliance professionals are facing a confluence of challenges: rising financial crime, fast-moving regulatory changes, and stricter enforcement and penalties for non-compliance. All of these factors make compliance an increasing burden and tax on the business.

Meanwhile, compliance teams are under pressure to keep costs low while managing risk exposure, but they’re drowning in expensive, low-value work as they navigate crude homegrown legacy systems or excel spreadsheets. Data is fragmented across disconnected tools and systems. The work is hard and nuanced with highly specific needs for each financial institution. And the pressure is high. Decisions not only need to be accurate, they need to be explainable and auditable.

The industry is at a pivotal moment. Manual processes (and the legacy vendors that supply them) have stretched teams to the breaking point, and the industry as a whole is navigating the shift from manual checks to always-on AI-driven oversight. The ability of generative AI to leverage and analyze unstructured data has been a major breakthrough. AI can rapidly gather and synthesize data to deliver high-quality insights in a fraction of the time – but only if compliance teams are able to seize on it. For those that can, these powerful new tools are helping to ease the burden, making compliance work faster, leaner, and more efficient.

The Birth Story of Hummingbird

Hummingbird was founded in 2017 by a team of technologists and former regulators who experienced firsthand how outdated compliance tools hindered progress. With experience managing risk at Circle and Square, they had seen precisely how disparate data sources, scattered risk signals, and algorithms directly contributed to the dismal, less than 1% success rate of global anti-money laundering controls.

It was here that the idea for Hummingbird – a platform capable of modernizing the fight against financial crime – was born.

The Hummingbird Solution

Hummingbird sets the new standard for AI-powered compliance. Its platform empowers financial institutions to run smarter, faster, and more scalable compliance programs by bringing speed and intelligence to all parts of the work.

When a team uses Hummingbird, they finally rid themselves of ad-hoc, stitched-together tools, inflexible all-in-one vendor agreements, or hard-to-scale internal builds. Instead, they work from a single source of truth that is both flexible and adaptable, allowing them to seamlessly orchestrate essential workflows, automate manual and repetitive tasks, and get the insights they need to make quick, accurate decisions.

Hummingbird supports the full spectrum of compliance operations: everything from monitoring and customer screening and KYC/KYB reviews to AML & Fraud investigations and regulatory reporting. The company is completely reimagining what’s possible from compliance work, helping financial institutions create programs that are streamlined, integrated, and future-proof.

With deep investments in performance and innovation, Hummingbird is driving game-changing efficiency gains at even the largest, most complex financial institutions. The platform connects effortlessly with internal systems and third-party data providers, removing the need for constant tool and tab switching. Process automation and AI augmented decision-making, meanwhile, supercharge workflows. Closing the loop, automated regulatory report filing eliminates busywork and improves case quality.

Deeply committed to building AI solutions that are safe and secure, Hummingbird is a leader in developing AI solutions that meet the standards of highly-regulated environments.

Leading banks, fast-scaling fintechs, gaming operators, and global crypto platforms depend on Hummingbird to handle complex financial crime investigations, navigate evolving regulation, and adapt quickly to new threats.

A Hummingbird Customer Story

BHG Financial, a leader in tailored financial solutions and lending, has built a reputation for risk management and regulatory compliance. They came to Hummingbird to address the challenges of increased alert volumes and a lengthy SAR filing process.

Hummingbird’s modular design allowed for BHG Financial to seamlessly connect both its core systems and fraud management platform directly to Hummingbird. This meant that not only could suspicious activity alerts be automatically sent to the compliance team, but all escalated fraud alerts could also be sent to Hummingbird for review and decisioning. By having their data automatically integrated into Hummingbird as a single source of truth, BHG Financial’s team transformed their program. In addition to the hours of data entry work (now eliminated), the bank completely overhauled its report-filing process. What had previously been a manual SAR filing process that took anywhere between 90 minutes to 3 hours, the BHG Financial team is now able to do this work in 20-30 minutes thanks to Hummingbird. In addition to the 77% reduction in SAR filing time, they’ve also had zero late or rejected filings, and audit requests are thirty minutes quicker on average.

Bryan Holloway, BHG Financial’s BSA Officer, notes that “It wouldn’t be unusual to have a team double the size of mine doing the same amount of work, but we’re able to do it because Hummingbird streamlines everything in a way that works for us.”

Hummingbird has been the cornerstone for the transformation of BHG Financial’s compliance program, allowing them to keep pace with the increased complexity and volume of suspicious activities in the digital lending space.

The Team Culture at Hummingbird

The team at Hummingbird is united by its mission to fight financial crime. It is led by fintech and regulatory veterans dedicated to building AI compliance tools that empower teams, mitigate risk, and protect the financial system. The broader team is also guided by this mission-first philosophy.

At Hummingbird, a strong culture and sense of purpose abound, despite the company’s remote-first status. Part of this is practical – regular onsites allow for teams and colleagues to gather and spend time together, while the other half has to do with the ethos and practices of the company.

Hummingbird’s four core values – do meaningful work, plan, execute, and learn, trust and practice empathy, and focus on the journey – provide a bedrock that keeps both team and culture grounded and healthy.

A Quote from the Founder of Hummingbird

"When we founded Hummingbird, we saw firsthand how outdated tools and fragmented data were hindering financial institutions in their fight against crime. Compliance professionals were drowning in manual, low-value work, and we knew there had to be a better way. We’re building an intelligent platform that brings speed and automation to every part of the compliance workflow, empowering teams to remove the busywork and focus on proactive, strategic insights. We're reimagining what's possible in compliance to protect our financial system." — Joe Robinson, Co-founder and CEO of Hummingbird

Find out more about Hummingbird

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