Sigma360 EDD agent aims to cut case time by up to 87%
The Sigma360 EDD agent, launched on October 22, 2026 by the New York risk intelligence company, automates the research and write-up behind enhanced due diligence (EDD) cases at banks and other financial institutions. Sigma360 says a single EDD case takes four hours of analyst time on average and that the agent is designed to cut case handling time by up to 87%. The analyst still makes every decision. For compliance teams, the task it targets is the data gathering that takes up most of each case.
Why enhanced due diligence strains compliance teams
Enhanced due diligence is the deeper check a financial institution runs on a higher-risk customer, and it is slow. Sigma360 says a single EDD case consumes four hours of analyst time on average, and eighty-five percent of that time goes to data gathering alone. At a mid-sized firm processing thousands of cases a year, the company estimates EDD costs consume $2 million in analyst capacity annually.
Regulators are paying closer attention. Sigma360 says that since mid-2025, enforcement actions by the FCA and FinCEN citing EDD failings have resulted in roughly $160M in combined fines.
What Sigma360 built
Sigma360 built an AI agent for the investigative legwork, designed, tested and validated by EDD analysts. It runs inside the Sigma360 platform alongside sanctions and watchlist screening, adverse media monitoring, entity resolution, perpetual KYC and network risk detection. The company was founded by Stuart Jones, Jr., a former US Treasury Department and National Counterterrorism Center official.
"EDD has been a significant pressure point for compliance teams for years, and is one that we believe is ripe for disruption." — Stuart Jones, Jr., founder and CEO of Sigma360
How the agent works on a case
The agent automates the steps that take analyst time. It collects internal and external data, summarizes findings across structured modules, identifies risk factors and mitigants, recommends next steps and writes a fully cited narrative ready for regulatory review.
The modules cover industry risk, source of wealth and source of funds, beneficial ownership, geographic risk and other areas, and each institution can configure them to its own risk appetite. Customers can read the agent's prompt to see what it does at each step. The agent works from Sigma360's own risk dataset, including sanctions and watchlist data and corporate registry and beneficial ownership records across more than 230 countries, rather than relying only on the open web.
Who makes the final call
The analyst stays the decision-maker throughout. Sigma360 says every risk rating and action is documented and traceable, so it can be defended at examination. The company also says the agent applies the same quality and citation standard to every case, regardless of an analyst's seniority or caseload.
What results Sigma360 claims
Sigma360 states its results as design targets. The company says the agent is designed to deliver up to an 87% reduction in case handling time, up to a 90% reduction in EDD costs per case, and projected annual savings of up to 90%. The annual figure is a projection. Sigma360 did not publish results from named customers with the launch.
The company also says the approach makes it possible to run EDD on a larger population of customer relationships than standard staffing would allow.
What it changes for banks and fintechs
For a bank, fintech or payments provider, the task the agent handles is the research half of each EDD case: pulling records, summarizing them and drafting the narrative. If the time claims hold, analysts would spend less of each four-hour case collecting data and more on the judgment calls that regulators examine.
The configurable modules matter for compliance teams that must follow their own written policies. Sigma360 says institutions can align the agent with existing policies instead of changing their policies to fit a vendor's framework.
Questions and answers
What does the Sigma360 EDD agent do?
It gathers internal and external data for an enhanced due diligence case, summarizes findings, identifies risk factors, recommends next steps and drafts a fully cited narrative for regulatory review.
How much time can AI save on enhanced due diligence?
Sigma360 says its agent is designed to cut case handling time by up to 87%, against an average of four hours of analyst time per case today. These are the company's targets, not published customer results.
Who makes the decision on an EDD case?
The analyst. The agent recommends next steps, but every risk rating and action stays with a person and is documented for examination.
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How we would build it
Enhanced due diligence is a good fit for an agent because most of the work is collecting and summarizing records, and the final step is a judgment a regulator expects a person to make. If we were building an agent like this, we would treat the case file as the product. Every statement in the narrative would point to the record it came from, and the analyst would see the sources before the summary, not after it.
We would keep the model away from the decision itself. It would gather, sort and draft, and the analyst would set the risk rating. Each institution's written policy would decide which modules run for which customer type, and any change to that setup would need sign-off from the compliance lead.
It would break on names and ownership chains. A common name, a shell company or an out-of-date registry entry can send the agent down the wrong path, and a well-written narrative can make a weak match look solid. We would show the analyst how confident each match is and flag every case where two records disagree. The one metric we would watch is the share of agent-drafted cases that the analyst sends back for more research. Next, we would build a review sample in which a second analyst checks a share of closed cases, so the time saved never hides a drop in quality.
Sources
Where the facts in this story come from.
- 01Sigma360 Launches AI-Powered Enhanced Due Diligence Agent to Synthesize Compliance Data and Cut Investigation Time by 87 Percentprnewswire.com
- 02Sigma360 Launches AI-Powered Enhanced Due Diligence Agent to Synthesize Compliance Data and Cut Investigation Time by 87 Percent | Sigma360 News & Presssigma360.com
- 03Sigma360 Launches AI-Powered Enhanced Due Diligence Agent to Synthesize Compliance Data and Cut Investigation Time by 87 Percentglobalfintechseries.com