Best AI Agents for Merchant Underwriting (2026)

The best AI agents for merchant underwriting in 2026 are Ballerine and G2 Risk Solutions for acquirers, ISOs, and payfacs that need website risk, policy checks, and ongoing merchant monitoring; Middesk for US business verification and MCC classification; and Sardine for merchant risk inside a broader fraud and AML platform. Enigma, Persona, Footprint, and LexisNexis are strong data and verification layers. Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams: the best fit when underwriting means combining several of these sources with your own policy and drafting the decision, in your own cloud.

We make Runtime, so weigh our pick accordingly; every other entry is based on the vendor's own published materials as of October 2026.

How we evaluated

• Business verification. Secretary of State and IRS checks, TIN matching, international registry coverage, and UBO and owner KYC.
• Online presence and MCC. Website and social review, prohibited-business detection, and industry classification.
• Ongoing monitoring. Merchant monitoring after approval, card network rule compliance, and transaction laundering detection.
• Decisioning and workflow. Whether the tool applies your policy, manages cases, and drafts a decision, or returns data for someone else to decide.
• Deployment and pricing. API, console, or agent; vendor cloud or your own; and what is published.

At a glance

The best AI agents for merchant underwriting

1. Runtime: best for underwriting across many sources and teams

Best for: acquirers, payfacs, PSPs, and fintechs whose underwriters stitch together KYB, website reviews, statements, and internal data by hand.

Strengths: Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Underwriters build agents from their own credit and risk policy. An agent pulls the KYB result from your vendor, reviews the website and social presence through a browser, checks owners, reads processing statements and bank data, compares the declared MCC to what the merchant actually sells, and drafts an approval, reserve, or decline with the evidence. Applying a reserve or approving a merchant waits for a person. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or self-hosted, on any model, with fallbacks. A forward-deployed engineer builds the first agents with your team.

Watch out for: Runtime does not sell business data. You bring your KYB and data vendors, and Runtime agents work across them.

2. Ballerine: best for acquirers and payfacs across the merchant lifecycle

Best for: acquirers, ISOs, payfacs, banks, and marketplaces that need onboarding, underwriting, and monitoring in one place.

Strengths: Ballerine calls itself an AI-native risk intelligence platform for underwriting and monitoring merchants. Product lines cover onboarding (KYB), underwriting, monitoring, and partner oversight, with modules for UBO, transaction analysis, high-risk verticals, and offline merchants. Workforce, launched in September 2026, lets agents own a risk operation end to end, and Policy Fit turns acceptable-use policies into a decision engine. Gated Content Access reviews website pages behind logins. It says it is a Mastercard-certified merchant monitoring service provider, and parts of its stack are open source.

Watch out for: it is a young company, founded in 2022, and its headline reductions in false positives and scheme fines are its own claims.

3. Middesk: best for US business verification and MCC

Best for: payment platforms and fintechs onboarding US businesses at volume.

Strengths: Middesk is a business identity platform built on 400+ government and authoritative sources, with direct IRS and Secretary of State connections. It builds a merchant profile from a name or TIN. Industry Classification returns NAICS, SIC, and MCC codes from a URL, and Middesk Risk scores web presence. It adds prohibited and high-risk business flags, MATCH screening, shell and synthetic business detection, entity graphs for fraud rings and transaction laundering, and continuous portfolio monitoring. Middesk Agents run AI investigations for CIP, CDD, EDD, and merchant risk. It is SOC 2 Type II.

Watch out for: coverage is US-centric, and its payments page does not detail owner KYC.

4. Sardine: best for merchant risk inside a fraud and AML platform

Best for: PSPs and fintechs that want merchant underwriting, fraud, and AML on one platform.

Strengths: Sardine's KYB checks registries across hundreds of jurisdictions for legal existence and tax IDs, with UBO look-through and nominee detection. Its AI agents crawl websites, linked domains, and social presence, and handle OSINT, adverse media, and document checks. It validates the declared MCC against observed behavior, detects prohibited activity and transaction laundering, and runs a merchant fraud model for keyed transactions, BIN attacks, and refunds. Device intelligence, consortium data, and case management are included.

Watch out for: merchant underwriting is one module of a broad suite, so you are buying into the wider platform.

5. G2 Risk Solutions: best for merchant monitoring and laundering detection

Best for: acquirers, payment providers, and marketplaces with large merchant portfolios to monitor.

Strengths: G2 Risk Solutions (G2RS) combined with EverC in October 2025 and kept the G2RS name. It offers persistent merchant monitoring, transaction laundering detection, and reputation monitoring, plus Global Onboarding for AI-powered merchant onboarding, Smart Scan for AI risk assessment of marketplaces and their payment providers, and MarketView for marketplace listing scans. It also covers ID verification, PEP and sanctions checks, and license verification.

Watch out for: the portfolio is assembled from acquisitions, so check how well the pieces work together. It uses less agent-style automation language than other merchant-risk specialists.

6. Enigma: best for business data with public pricing

Best for: teams that want KYB and card revenue data through an API they can try today.

Strengths: Enigma is a business data platform built on an identity graph that links brands, DBAs, locations, legal entities, and government records. It covers KYB at application, sanctions and watchlist screening, merchant card revenue visibility, and payment risk underwriting. The Enigma KYB Agent offers chat-based verification, and MCP access is included in the Max plan. Pricing is public: Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, and custom Enterprise, with KYB Verify at $2.50 per check and watchlist screening at $0.50.

Watch out for: it is a data and verification layer. We found no merchant monitoring, transaction laundering detection, or case management.

7. Persona: best for KYB plus owner KYC in one flow

Best for: platforms that verify both the business and the people behind it.

Strengths: Persona is identity infrastructure for KYC, KYB, AML, and trust and safety. It unifies KYB with KYC on owners, and reports include TIN verification, US business registration, watchlists, adverse media, and associated persons. The Business Classification Report returns NAICS codes and an MCC from the business's name and website and flags high-risk industries. Workflows and case management are built in, and Verified Agents help tell humans, bots, and authorized AI agents apart.

Watch out for: it is not focused on merchant monitoring or transaction laundering, and its lighter Business Verification add-on is US-only and excludes classification and owner KYC.

8. Footprint: best for regulated fintechs that want an investigation agent

Best for: OCC and FDIC-regulated banks, fintechs, and marketplaces onboarding businesses and their owners.

Strengths: Footprint calls itself an AI operating system for compliance and risk. Percy, its agent, runs investigations end to end with cited sources, on a governance layer called Trust Fabric. KYB pulls Secretary of State filings from state databases, detects missing beneficial owners, and shows street view of the primary address. It also covers EDD, sanctions, monitoring, case management, and data vaulting, with SOC 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001. It closed a $25M Series B in September 2026.

Watch out for: its site does not highlight merchant-specific features like MCC classification or website risk.

9. LexisNexis Risk Solutions: best for US business identity data at scale

Best for: banks, lenders, and large processors that already buy LexisNexis data.

Strengths: InstantID Business draws on 10,000+ data sources and returns a Business Verification Index and an Authorized Representative Index, checks watchlists, and links up to five authorized representatives for KYC. It can be delivered by API or batch, or through AML Insight and the Dynamic Decision Platform. LexisNexis acquired IDVerse in 2025 for AI document authentication and liveness.

Watch out for: we found no named underwriting agent and no dedicated website, MCC, or merchant monitoring product on its site. Coverage is mostly US.

Where Runtime enters the picture

Every tool above returns a piece of the underwriting file. The underwriter still assembles it: the KYB result from one vendor, the website review from another, owner KYC, processing statements, bank data, and the sales notes. Then they apply the credit policy and write the memo. After approval, the same merchant shows up again when payment ops sees a spike in refunds, support gets complaints, or a chargeback ratio climbs. A Runtime agent assembles the file once, applies your policy, drafts the approval, reserve, or decline with evidence, and keeps watching. When the merchant's behavior changes, it reopens the case with full history instead of starting over.

• No single vendor to depend on. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or fully self-hosted, on your sandbox provider with fallbacks, on Claude, GPT, Gemini, or open-weight models, with harness routing across Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. Swap a data vendor without rebuilding the process.
• Guardrails you set. Read-only by default, a person signs off before any merchant approval, reserve, or payout hold, RBAC, masked credentials, SSNs and card numbers stripped from prompts and logs, and every run recorded for your sponsor bank.
• Built for teams. Underwriting, risk, onboarding, payment ops, and support share agents, templates, and one memory, so a merchant has one record from application to offboarding.
• An engineer, not an account executive. A forward-deployed AI engineer who has built risk and underwriting systems, with experience from Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, and BlackRock, builds the first agents with your team.

Describe the jobConnect your tools, even legacy onesKeep a human in the loopNo single vendor to depend onOne memory across teamsEvery run is stored

[::]New agent

Create a banking ops agent that handles RFIs, hold-harmless requests, and returns of funds from our partner bank, verifies against our ledger, and drafts replies for my approval.

Describe the agent you want

Agent ready

bank-ops-agent

Tools picked from your prompt

EmailLedgerSFTPMastercard

How to choose

• You are an acquirer, ISO, or payfac and need onboarding plus card network monitoring: Ballerine or G2 Risk Solutions.
• You onboard US businesses and need verification and MCC from one API: Middesk.
• You want merchant risk, fraud, and AML on one platform: Sardine.
• You want business data with public, per-check pricing: Enigma.
• You verify the business and its owners in one flow: Persona or Footprint.
• You already buy LexisNexis data for other teams: LexisNexis InstantID Business.
• Your underwriters assemble files from several of these sources by hand: Runtime, on top of the vendors you already use.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI agent for merchant underwriting?

For acquirers, ISOs, and payfacs, Ballerine and G2 Risk Solutions specialize in merchant onboarding, website risk, and ongoing monitoring. Middesk is the strongest source for US business verification and MCC classification. Sardine covers merchant risk inside a broader fraud and AML platform. Runtime fits teams that want an agent to combine these sources with their own credit policy and draft the decision.

Can AI agents assign an MCC code?

Yes. Middesk's Industry Classification returns NAICS, SIC, and MCC codes from a website, Persona's Business Classification Report returns NAICS codes and an MCC, and Sardine validates the declared MCC against observed behavior. An underwriter should still confirm the code for high-risk verticals.

Which merchant underwriting tools detect transaction laundering?

G2 Risk Solutions offers transaction laundering detection and persistent merchant monitoring, Sardine detects prohibited activity and transaction laundering, Middesk builds entity graphs for fraud rings and transaction laundering, and Ballerine covers card network monitoring rules.

Do merchant underwriting vendors publish pricing?

Enigma publishes plans (Free, Pro at $20 per month, Max at $200 per month, and custom Enterprise) and per-check credits, with KYB Verify at $2.50. Most others, including Ballerine, Middesk, Sardine, G2 Risk Solutions, Footprint, and LexisNexis, are sold through sales. Runtime publishes a free tier and Teams from $99 per seat per month.

Where does Runtime fit next to a KYB or merchant risk vendor?

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. It sits on top of your data vendors: an agent pulls the KYB result, website review, owner KYC, processing statements, and bank data, applies your credit and risk policy, and drafts the approval, reserve, or decline for an underwriter to sign off.