Sells large banks AI that sits on top of their existing sanctions-screening and transaction-monitoring systems and investigates, explains and closes or escalates the alerts those systems raise, now packaged as policy-bound AI agents on its Iris 7 platform.
What is Silent Eight, and which banks use it?
Silent Eight is a private Singapore company, founded in 2013, whose AI investigates and closes sanctions, name-screening and transaction alerts for banks. HSBC Ventures and Standard Chartered's SC Ventures are investors; TYH Ventures led its last disclosed round ($40 million, 2022). Its named customers are banks outside the US: Standard Chartered (since 2018), HSBC (since 2021) and Gulf lenders; none of our 100 tracked US banks is a named customer. Pricing is not published; contracts are sales-led.
Category
Founded
2013
Headquarters
Singapore
Ownership
Private; TYH Ventures led its $40 million Series B in March 2022, joined by HSBC Ventures and existing investors OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, SC Ventures (Standard Chartered), Aglaia and Koh Boon Hwee. It said it had raised $55 million to date and that the round quadrupled its October 2020 valuation, without disclosing a figure. No later round has been announced.[12][1]
Deployment
Managed service, customer cloud or on-premises (Iris 7)
Pricing
Sales-led enterprise contracts, delivered as a managed service, in the customer's cloud or on premises · not published
Banks among the 120
0
- Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Singapore; offices in New York, London, Warsaw and Bangalore. Martin Markiewicz is co-founder and CEO.
- Standard Chartered was its first global bank customer: the bank announced in July 2018 that its financial crime compliance teams were using Silent Eight to optimise name screening, and SC Ventures later invested.
- HSBC signed a multi-year deal in January 2021 for alert resolution, extended it to negative-news screening in October 2022 and to automated closure of transaction-screening alerts in February 2024; HSBC Ventures invested in the 2022 Series B.
- OCBC piloted Silent Eight in its 2017 Open Vault accelerator to automate research on suspicious individuals. Gulf banks Emirates NBD (February 2024), Mashreq (May 2024) and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (June 2024) have announced deployments; First Abu Dhabi Bank is named as a customer in Silent Eight's releases.
- Silent Eight says its AI resolved over 100 million alerts across three institutions and saved $19 million in operating costs (vendor-reported, January 2025).
- In September 2023 the CEO told CNBC the company aimed to be 'IPO ready' by the end of 2025 for a possible Nasdaq listing; no listing has been announced.
- Pricing is not published; silenteight.com has no pricing page and routes buyers to its sales team.
What does Silent Eight sell to banks?
| Product | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Iris 7 AI agents (customer and name screening)[6][9] | Agents, including the Name Screening Adjudicator, that investigate customer screening alerts against sanctions, PEP and adverse-media lists and return clear, escalate or refer decisions with a written rationale. | Generally available |
| Iris 7 payment screening[5][15] | Agents that parse SWIFT MT/MX, ACH, SEPA and Fedwire messages and adjudicate payment-screening alerts in real time; Silent Eight says up to 90% of alerts can be resolved without manual work. | Generally available |
| Transaction Monitoring Decisions Agent[4] | Intercepts cases from a bank's existing monitoring system, investigates customer, counterparty and transaction context, decides no risk, true risk or escalation, and drafts SAR-ready output for escalations. | Generally available |
| Adverse media (negative news) screening[14][16] | Machine-learning screening of negative news to identify customers who pose higher money-laundering, fraud or terrorist-financing risk; deployed at HSBC from 2022. | Generally available |
| Trade Surveillance Agent[7] | An Iris 7 agent that investigates market-abuse surveillance alerts against internal policy and market-abuse rules and closes, escalates or refers each one. | Generally available |
How much does Silent Eight cost?
How it is charged: Sales-led enterprise contracts, delivered as a managed service, in the customer's cloud or on premises.
Silent Eight does not publish a price list.
Pricing is not published; silenteight.com has no pricing page and directs buyers to contact sales. Silent Eight's CEO told CNBC in 2023 that the software is 'orders of magnitude' cheaper than the analysts needed to do the same work, but gave no prices.
Which banks use Silent Eight?
None of the 120 largest US banks covered on this site is publicly named as a Silent Eight customer as of Nov 3, 2026. Customers the company names are listed in the key points above.
Among the 120 largest US banks on this site, from sources that name the bank: the bank, Silent Eight or the press. Status is the furthest stage a source confirms.
What is Iris 7?
Silent Eight's decisioning platform, launched in 2025, whose AI agents take alerts from a bank's existing screening and monitoring systems, assemble context, apply the bank's policy and return a decision with a written narrative and audit trail; it runs as a managed service, in the customer's cloud or on premises.[1][3][4]
What has Silent Eight done, and when?
- Jan 1, 2025
Launches Iris 7 AI agents[1]
In 2025 Silent Eight launched Iris 7, a platform of policy-bound AI agents for screening, transaction-monitoring and other financial crime decisions.
- Jun 27, 2024
Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank partnership[10]
Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank announced it would use Silent Eight to automate screening-alert investigations, with launch set for September 2024.
- May 7, 2024
- Feb 22, 2024
HSBC adds transaction screening[15]
HSBC extended its use of Silent Eight to Automated Alert Closure for Transactions, which investigates and resolves transaction-screening alerts in real time.
- Feb 5, 2024
Emirates NBD partners after a proof of value[19]
Emirates NBD formed a partnership with Silent Eight to automate screening-alert investigations after a proof of value tested on alerts from the bank's screening system; its group chief compliance officer named Silent Eight's IRIS module.
- Sep 22, 2023
CEO targets 'IPO ready' by end of 2025[20]
Martin Markiewicz told CNBC that Silent Eight expected its first profitable year in 2023 and aimed to be ready for a possible Nasdaq listing by the end of 2025; he said HSBC, Standard Chartered and First Abu Dhabi Bank were among about a dozen customers.
- Oct 11, 2022
HSBC adds negative-news screening[14]
HSBC extended the partnership to machine-learning negative-news screening, with Silent Eight solving name-screening matches across every risk type at the bank.
- Mar 9, 2022
$40 million Series B led by TYH Ventures[12]
TYH Ventures led a $40 million Series B joined by HSBC Ventures, its customer; Silent Eight said it had raised $55 million to date and planned to hire over 150 data scientists and engineers in 2022.
- Jan 6, 2021
Multi-year partnership with HSBC[11]
After a trial, HSBC chose Silent Eight's Alert Resolution to close screening alerts with explained, auditable decisions inside its global compliance organisation.
- Oct 1, 2020
- Nov 1, 2019
$6.2 million Series A[1]
Silent Eight raised a $6.2 million Series A with OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and SC Ventures, Standard Chartered's venture arm.
- Jul 9, 2018
Standard Chartered partnership[17]
Standard Chartered announced its financial crime compliance teams were working with Silent Eight on Screening Optimisation, using machine learning to propose decisions on name-screening alerts.
- Jul 19, 2017
OCBC pilots Silent Eight[18]
OCBC Bank said it had piloted Silent Eight in its Open Vault accelerator to automate desktop research on suspicious individuals, cutting that step from about an hour to a minute.
- Jan 1, 2013
Silent Eight founded in Singapore[13]
Silent Eight was founded in Singapore in 2013 to apply AI to financial crime investigations.
What do banks use Silent Eight for?
| Use | What it does | Status | Use case |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sanctions, PEP and name-screening alert adjudication[17][11][19][9] | Investigating and closing or escalating customer name-screening alerts, the use at Standard Chartered, HSBC, Emirates NBD and Mashreq. | In production | AML / KYC |
| Transaction and payment screening[15][5] | Real-time closure of transaction-screening alerts, deployed at HSBC from 2024. | In production | AML / KYC |
| Adverse-media screening[14] | Machine-learning negative-news screening for customers who pose money-laundering, fraud or terrorist-financing risk. | In production | Fraud detection |
| Iris 7 investigation agents[1][4] | AI agents that assemble evidence, apply a bank's policy and write a decision narrative for each alert, with humans setting policy and reviewing exceptions. | In production | Generative & agentic AI |
| Trade surveillance alerts[7] | An Iris 7 agent for market-abuse surveillance alerts; no bank has been named using it. | Announced | Trading & capital markets |
What has Silent Eight disclosed in numbers?
| Metric | Value | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Total funding raised | $55 million, including a $40 million Series B led by TYH Ventures[12] | Mar 9, 2022 |
| Alerts resolved and costs saved (vendor-reported) | Over 100 million alerts across three institutions; $19 million in operating costs saved[8] | Jan 14, 2025 |
| Customers (CEO interview) | About a dozen, including HSBC, Standard Chartered and First Abu Dhabi Bank[20] | Sep 22, 2023 |
| Markets deployed (vendor-reported) | Over 150 markets[12] | Mar 9, 2022 |
| Transaction-monitoring cases resolved by the agent (vendor-reported) | 76%[4] | Nov 2, 2026 |
“Given the growth in alert volumes, and unpredictable spikes driven by global volatility, we saw an opportunity with Silent Eight that would give us the ability to close alerts quickly and accurately”[11]
Matt Brown · Group Head of Compliance Services, HSBC · Jan 6, 2021
“In the realm of financial transactions, precision is paramount.”[15]
Chris Pratt · Group Head of Transaction Screening, HSBC · Feb 22, 2024
“So we just knew that we will have to start with some big financial institutions first, for the other ones to know that there is no risk and follow.”[20]
Martin Markiewicz · CEO, Silent Eight · Sep 22, 2023
Who runs Silent Eight?
Which rules apply to a bank using Silent Eight?
| Authority | Why it matters here | Documents |
|---|---|---|
| Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) | Silent Eight's agents close sanctions-screening and payment-screening alerts as false positives; a US bank using them stays liable for any payment to a sanctioned party, so the policy behind each automated closure and its audit trail are part of the bank's own sanctions controls. | |
| FinCEN | Automated alert closure and SAR-ready output from the Transaction Monitoring Decisions Agent feed a bank's BSA/AML program; FinCEN's 2021 statement on model risk management for BSA/AML systems and its 2018 innovation statement frame how a bank tests and relies on such tools. | 2021 BSA/AML Model Risk Management Statement 2018 Joint Statement on BSA/AML Innovation |
| OCC | A bank that lets a vendor's AI close compliance alerts, whether hosted by Silent Eight as a managed service or run in its own cloud, takes on third-party risk under OCC Bulletin 2023-17, and OCC Bulletin 2026-13 sets model-risk expectations for vendor models. | OCC Bulletin 2023-17 OCC Bulletin 2026-13 |
| Federal Reserve | Silent Eight's screening and monitoring models are machine-learning models a bank must inventory, validate and monitor under SR 26-2; the agentic layer of Iris 7 falls to the bank's broader risk management, since SR 26-2 leaves generative and agentic AI outside its scope. | SR 26-2 |
| EU AI Act | Silent Eight's named customers include banks operating in the EU and UK; a bank deploying its alert-closure AI there must work out which EU AI Act obligations apply to an AML system it did not build. | Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 |
Linked authorities have a page in the Regulation tracker; the others are named for completeness.
What should a bank note before buying Silent Eight?
Analysis by BankingNewsAI from the sources cited on this page. Observations, not advice or a recommendation.
01
Pricing is not published
There is no pricing page; contracts are sales-led, and the CEO's cost comparison with human analysts gives no figures.
02
Its two anchor customers are also investors
Standard Chartered (through SC Ventures) and HSBC (through HSBC Ventures) are both shareholders and the most prominent customers, which buyers may weigh when reading their endorsements.
03
Performance figures are vendor-reported
The 100 million alerts, $19 million savings, 76% case-resolution and 90% payment-alert figures come from Silent Eight's own pages; no bank has published comparable figures in the sources reviewed here.
04
Customer base is concentrated
The CEO described about a dozen customers in 2023, and Silent Eight said its 100 million alerts came from three institutions; the public record centres on HSBC, Standard Chartered and Gulf banks.
05
No named US bank customer
Silent Eight has a New York office and markets payment screening for Fedwire and ACH, but none of the customers it names is a US bank, and none of the 100 US banks we track appears as a customer; the HSBC and Standard Chartered work is described at group level.
06
Funding is from 2022
The last disclosed round was the March 2022 Series B; the IPO-readiness target the CEO set for the end of 2025 has not been followed by an announced listing.
What are the alternatives to Silent Eight?
ComplyAdvantage
AML screening, monitoring and payment screening on its own risk data (sanctions, PEPs, adverse media), with AI agents for alert review.
Hawk
AML transaction monitoring, sanctions and customer screening, fraud prevention and AI investigation agents for banks and payment firms.
NICE Actimize
Fraud, AML, sanctions screening, KYC, case management and trade surveillance software for banks, on X-Sight and Xceed platforms.
Palantir (Foundry and AIP)
Data and AI platforms (Foundry, AIP) that banks configure for onboarding, KYC, customer data and anti-financial-crime work.
Quantexa
Decision Intelligence platform: entity resolution and network analytics for AML, KYC and fraud; Cloud AML SaaS for US mid-size banks.
SymphonyAI
Financial-crime software for banks: AML transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, KYC, payment fraud and AI investigation agents.
How much does Silent Eight cost?
Silent Eight does not publish pricing. Its website has no pricing page and directs banks to its sales team, and it sells enterprise contracts delivered as a managed service, in the bank's own cloud or on premises. Its CEO told CNBC in 2023 that the software is 'orders of magnitude' cheaper than paying the analysts needed for the same work, but no fees or plans are public.
Which banks use Silent Eight?
None of the 100 US banks we track is a named Silent Eight customer. Its named customers are global groups: Standard Chartered has used it for name-screening alert review since 2018, and HSBC since 2021 for alert resolution, extended to negative-news screening in 2022 and transaction screening in 2024. Emirates NBD, Mashreq, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank and First Abu Dhabi Bank are also named, and OCBC piloted it in 2017.
Who owns Silent Eight?
Silent Eight is privately held. TYH Ventures led its $40 million Series B in March 2022, joined by HSBC Ventures and existing investors OTB Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, SC Ventures (Standard Chartered's venture arm), Aglaia and Koh Boon Hwee. It said it had raised $55 million in total. It did not disclose a valuation and has announced no round since.
Is Silent Eight a bank or a regulated firm?
No. Silent Eight is a Singapore-headquartered software company, not a bank. Its AI investigates and closes or escalates alerts raised by a bank's own screening and monitoring systems, but the bank keeps the sanctions and anti-money-laundering obligations and oversees Silent Eight as a third-party vendor and its models under model-risk rules.
What is Silent Eight Iris 7?
Iris 7 is Silent Eight's platform, launched in 2025, of AI agents for financial crime decisions. The agents take alerts from a bank's existing customer-screening, payment-screening, transaction-monitoring or trade-surveillance systems, gather context, apply the bank's policy and return a decision with a written narrative and audit trail. Silent Eight says humans set the policy and review exceptions.
Does Silent Eight replace a bank's screening system?
No. Silent Eight's own pages say its agents work on top of existing screening and monitoring systems: they take in the alerts those systems generate and decide or escalate them, without replacing the detection engines. A bank therefore keeps its screening vendor and adds Silent Eight as the investigation and decision layer.
How is Silent Eight different from Hawk or ComplyAdvantage?
Silent Eight sells mainly the investigation and decision step: AI that adjudicates alerts produced by a bank's existing screening and monitoring tools. Vendors such as ComplyAdvantage and Hawk also sell the screening data or detection engines that generate alerts. A bank can buy Silent Eight alongside an existing detection system rather than in place of it.
- Silent Eight History | Growth, Partnerships & Iris 7
- Learn More About Silent Eight's Purpose and Mission
- Iris 7 Deployment | Secure, Flexible Delivery for Agentic AI
- Transaction Monitoring Decisions Agent | Autonomous AML Investigation & Decisioning
- Real-Time Payments Screening | AI-Powered Screening with Iris 7
- Customer Screening | AI-Powered Screening with Iris 7
- Trade Surveillance Agent | Detect & Investigate Market Abuse with AI
- The Promise of AI Agents in Financial Crime Compliance: Silent Eight Leads the Charge
- Silent Eight Wins ICA's Compliance AI Solution of the Year 2025
- Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank Partners with Silent Eight to Automate Financial Crime Compliance Screening
- HSBC and Silent Eight Announce Multi-Year Partnership to Fight Financial Crime
- Silent Eight Raises $40m in Series B Round
- RegTech vendor Silent Eight raises further funding
- HSBC and Silent Eight Expand Machine Learning Partnership
- Silent Eight Announces Expansion of Partnership with HSBC To Provide Transaction Screening Solutions
- Mashreq Partners with Silent Eight for Compliance Alert Adjudication
- We've partnered with Regulatory Technology firm Silent Eight
- OCBC Bank Pilots Artificial Intelligence Solutions with Two Fintechs to Fight Money Laundering
- Emirates NBD partners Silent Eight to bolster compliance operations
- An HSBC-backed startup is using AI to help banks fight financial crime — and eyeing a Nasdaq IPO
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