Footprint Alternatives for KYC and Risk Ops (2026)

The best Footprint alternatives in 2026 are Runtime, Alloy, Socure, Sumsub, Middesk, and Unit21. Alloy and Socure fit identity decisioning at scale, Sumsub fits global KYC with published pricing, Middesk fits US business verification, and Unit21 fits AML monitoring and filing. Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams, and it works the risk ops cases any of them raise across support, payment ops, and finance.

We make Runtime, so weigh our pick accordingly. Vendor facts below come from each vendor's own site or announcements.

Why teams look for Footprint alternatives

Footprint combines KYC, KYB, bank account linking, and a vault that decrypts data only inside secure enclaves, and it now leads with Percy, an agentic system that investigates compliance cases and runs a team's policies in plain English. It raised a $25M Series B in September 2026. Teams still compare it for fair reasons:

• Fit. Footprint now focuses on financial crime compliance for regulated banks and fintechs. Teams that need large-scale fraud scoring, global document coverage, or deep US KYB may want a specialist.
• Scope. Percy works inside Footprint's platform. Cases that need the ledger, processor, or support history leave it.
• Deployment. Footprint is hosted and does not document a self-hosted option.
• Pricing model. Footprint does not publish pricing.

At a glance

The best Footprint alternatives

Runtime

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. It does not verify identities. It gives risk, compliance, onboarding, payment ops, and support agents that run on isolated computers in your cloud and work the reviews your KYC vendor raises, with the ledger, processor, help desk, and the vendor's own data as tools. Agents draft the decision with evidence and wait for approval.

Best for: fintechs whose risk reviews touch other teams and systems. Strengths: your cloud and your models; PII and card numbers stripped from prompts and logs; one record per case; a forward-deployed engineer builds the first agents. Watch out for: you still need an identity vendor. Runtime works next to it.

Alloy

Alloy is an identity and risk decisioning platform for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. It orchestrates hundreds of data partners into no-code workflows for onboarding, KYC, KYB, AML screening, transaction monitoring, fraud, and credit decisioning. Its AI Assistant, launched in February 2026, recommends case decisions for approval, and Alloy reports more than 900 financial institutions and fintechs as customers.

Best for: banks and lenders that want to choose and swap data providers. Strengths: data partner choice; perpetual KYC and KYB; credit decisioning on the same engine. Watch out for: no built-in vault comparable to Footprint's. Pricing is not published.

Socure

Socure is an identity, fraud, and compliance platform built on RiskOS, its decisioning and orchestration layer. Products include ID+, Sigma fraud models, Predictive DocV, watchlist screening, and eCBSV. It launched a RiskOS AI Suite in October 2025 and acquired Fravity, an agentic operations platform, in August 2026. Socure names Citi, Capital One, and Coinbase as customers.

Best for: large banks, card issuers, and high-volume fintechs. Strengths: published self-serve pricing, with $1,000 in free monthly credits, then $0.80 to $1.30 per evaluation; scale; synthetic identity fraud models. Watch out for: its agent layer is a fresh acquisition still being integrated.

Sumsub

Sumsub is a verification and compliance platform covering document and liveness checks, KYB with UBO verification, AML screening, transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, and the crypto Travel Rule, with case management and Summy AI Copilot. In June 2026 it released an MCP server so outside agents can work with Sumsub. It reports more than 4,000 clients.

Best for: companies onboarding users across many countries. Strengths: published pricing, Basic at $1.35 per verification ($149 monthly minimum) and Compliance at $1.85 ($299 minimum); a 14-day trial; global coverage. Watch out for: KYB, transaction monitoring, and fraud prevention are on a custom plan.

Middesk

Middesk is business identity infrastructure. It matches business names and TINs against the IRS, searches Secretary of State filings across all 50 states and DC, monitors businesses, and now verifies businesses in 30 countries. Middesk Agents work CIP, CDD, EDD, and merchant risk questions with evidence on every finding. Customers include Mercury, Brex, and Ramp.

Best for: B2B fintechs and payment companies onboarding US businesses. Strengths: authoritative US data; KYB agents; underwriting data like UCC filings. Watch out for: business identity only, not consumer KYC. Pricing is not published.

Unit21

Unit21 is a fraud and AML platform with real-time and AML transaction monitoring, sanctions and payment screening, case management, and direct SAR and CTR filing with FinCEN. Its Detection and Investigation agents summarize risk, write case narratives, and surface linked entities. Customers include Chime, Brex, and Sallie Mae.

Best for: teams whose risk ops work is mostly monitoring alerts and SARs. Strengths: detection through filing on one platform; agents in production at more than 100 customers, per Unit21. Watch out for: no native identity verification, so it pairs with a KYC vendor.

Where Runtime enters the picture

Identity vendors decide who a customer is, and their agents increasingly work the compliance review inside their own platform. Risk ops at a payment company goes further. A business passes KYB, then three months later its volume spikes, a chargeback lands, and the partner bank sends an RFI. Compliance needs the onboarding file, payment ops needs the processor history, finance needs to decide on a reserve, and support is answering the merchant. Each team pulls its own piece.

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Agents use Footprint or any vendor above as one tool among many, pull the processing history, ledger, and tickets, draft the RFI response and the reserve recommendation, and stop for approval before funds are held or released.

• No single vendor to depend on. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or fully self-hosted, on your choice of sandbox provider with fallbacks, using Claude, GPT, Gemini, or open-weight models, with harness routing across Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode.
• Guardrails you set. Read-only by default, approvals before money moves, RBAC, masked credentials, SSNs and card numbers stripped from prompts and logs, every run recorded for your sponsor bank.
• Built for teams. Onboarding, risk, compliance, payment ops, finance, and support share agents, templates, and one memory.
• An engineer, not an account executive. A forward-deployed AI engineer with a payments background from Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, or 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

Rain replaced $250k in vendor spend with Runtime.

How to choose

• Stay on Footprint if you want verification, a secure vault, and a compliance agent from one vendor.
• Choose Alloy if you want to orchestrate many data providers with credit decisioning.
• Choose Socure if you need identity and fraud decisioning at bank scale, with self-serve pricing to start.
• Choose Sumsub if you onboard across many countries and want published per-verification pricing.
• Choose Middesk if most of your customers are US businesses.
• Choose Unit21 if your risk ops queue is mostly monitoring alerts and SAR filing.
• Choose Runtime if your reviews need data from your ledger, processor, and help desk, and decisions turn into work for other teams. It runs alongside any of the above.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best Footprint alternatives?

Alloy for identity and risk orchestration across many data partners, Socure for identity and fraud decisioning with published per-evaluation pricing, Sumsub for global KYC and KYB, Middesk for US business verification, Unit21 for AML monitoring and SAR filing, and Runtime for agents that work risk cases across every payment team.

Which Footprint alternatives publish pricing?

Sumsub publishes Basic at $1.35 per verification with a $149 monthly minimum and Compliance at $1.85 with a $299 minimum. Socure Launch includes $1,000 in free monthly credits, then $0.80 to $1.30 per evaluation. Runtime publishes Free, Teams from $99 per seat per month, and custom Enterprise. Footprint, Alloy, Middesk, and Unit21 do not publish pricing.

What is Footprint's Percy?

Percy is Footprint's agentic system for financial crime compliance. It investigates cases, surfaces findings, and runs a team's policies written in plain English, across KYC, enhanced due diligence, sanctions, and monitoring. Footprint announced a $25M Series B led by QED in September 2026.

Can Runtime replace Footprint?

Not for identity verification or vaulting. Runtime does not verify identities or store PII in a vault. It runs agents that work the reviews and investigations around those checks, using your KYC vendor as a tool.

Where does Runtime fit next to Footprint?

Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams. Footprint verifies and investigates inside its platform; Runtime agents carry the case into the ledger, processor, support tickets, and the teams that hold funds or answer the customer, with approvals and one record.