Runtime vs Footprint: AI Agents for Risk and Payment Ops

Feature	Runtime	Footprint
What it is	Agent harness for every payment team	Identity and risk platform with AI analysts
Teams covered	Risk, compliance, payment ops, finance, support, onboarding	Risk, fraud, and compliance
Identity verification and vaulting	Connects to your KYC vendors	Built in
Purpose-built risk analyst agent	You build it from your SOPs	Out of the box
Shared memory across teams	One governed memory for every team	Within risk operations
Runs in your cloud	Yes, or fully self-hosted	Hosted platform
Bring your own models	Any model, including local open models	Vendor-managed
Audit trail	Every query, tool call, approval, and cost	Auditable investigations
Forward-deployed engineers	Included for rollouts	Vendor onboarding

Footprint is the better fit if you want identity verification, vaulting, and an out-of-the-box risk analyst agent from one vendor. Runtime is the better fit if you want agents for every team that touches a transaction, not only risk, running in your own cloud. Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams.

Footprint and Runtime at a glance

Footprint builds AI for financial-crime compliance. Its platform covers KYC, KYB, bank account linking, a secure data vault, and compliance review, led by Percy, an agentic system that investigates every case, surfaces findings, and runs your policies in plain English. Footprint raised a $25M Series B in September 2026 and sells to regulated banks and fintechs.

Runtime is an agent harness for payment teams. From payment ops to risk, compliance, and support, anyone on the team can build agents that work their queues on their own computers inside your cloud, called from Slack, Teams, email, SMS, or voice, with approvals and a full audit trail.

Footprint is for risk and compliance teams that want identity and a risk analyst agent from one vendor. Runtime is for fintechs that want every team that touches a transaction on one agent platform.

How they differ

Scope: one team or every team

Footprint goes deep inside risk and compliance operations: identity, fraud signals, and alert review. Runtime is built for every team that touches a transaction, including risk, with one platform and one shared memory.

Your cloud, your models

Footprint runs as a hosted platform with vendor-managed models. Runtime agent computers run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or fully self-hosted. You choose the models, including open-weight models in your cloud for PCI and PII work, and card numbers and SSNs are stripped from prompts and logs.

Built from your SOPs, with an engineer

Footprint's risk agent works out of the box. Runtime agents are built from your own SOPs with a forward-deployed AI engineer who has built payment and risk systems. The FDE maps your processes, builds the first agents with your team, and sets up the guardrails and approvals.

Where Runtime enters the picture

A risk alert is usually one chapter of a bigger story. Take a payout flagged for review after a merchant's bank account changes. Support gets the ticket when the merchant asks where the money is, payment ops traces the payout at the processor, finance sees a reconciliation break when it doesn't settle, and risk or compliance decides whether the account change was fraud. Footprint helps the risk team with its part. The other three teams still investigate separately, in their own tools. On Runtime it's one investigation with one record that every team can see.

You don't have to start with all four teams. Runtime lands the way a specialist vendor does: one team, one sharp queue, such as alert triage or onboarding reviews. Because every agent runs on the same harness and shares one memory, the next agent for payment ops or finance builds on what the first one learned, and the platform grows to every team. Rain replaced $250k in vendor spend with Runtime.

No single vendor to depend on. Agents run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account or self-hosted, on any sandbox provider with fallbacks, and on Claude, GPT, Gemini, or open-weight models, with routing across Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. An outage or model change at one provider doesn't stop your queues.
Guardrails you set. Agents start read-only, a person approves before a payout release or reserve, credentials are masked, card numbers and SSNs are stripped from prompts and logs, and every run is recorded.
Built for teams. Support, payment ops, finance, risk, and compliance share agents, templates, and one memory, with role-based access deciding who sees what.
An engineer, not an account executive. Your forward-deployed AI engineer has built payment systems at Hulu's payments team at Disney, Finix, Modern Treasury, or BlackRock, and starts with your sharpest queue.

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

Anyone on the team describes the work in plain English and attaches the SOP. Runtime builds the agent and gives it its own computer.

Where Footprint is stronger

Identity infrastructure. KYC, KYB, and a secure data vault are built in.
Out-of-the-box risk analyst. Percy handles alert triage, evidence collection, and SAR narrative drafts without building from SOPs.
One vendor for identity and risk ops. Fewer integrations if that's your whole scope.

Which should you choose

Choose Footprint if

You need identity verification, KYC/KYB, and vaulting from one vendor
Your main bottleneck is risk and compliance alert review
You want an opinionated, purpose-built risk analyst agent
Other teams aren't in scope for agents yet

Choose Runtime if

You want risk, compliance, payment ops, finance, and support on one platform
Agents need to work across your ledger, processor, bank files, and tickets
Data and models have to stay in your cloud
You need approvals on money movement and an audit trail your sponsor bank will accept

Running both works well: Footprint for identity and vaulting, Runtime for the operations work around it.

See Runtime on your busiest queue

Bring one SOP. A forward-deployed AI engineer builds the first agent with your team, inside your cloud.

Book a demo

Frequently asked questions

Is Footprint good for fintech risk and compliance?

Yes. Footprint combines KYC, KYB, a data vault, and a compliance review platform with Percy, its agentic system that investigates cases and runs your policies across KYC, EDD, sanctions, and monitoring. Runtime is the better fit when you also want payment ops, finance, and support agents on the same platform.

Can Footprint replace my KYC vendor and Runtime replace my analysts?

They do different jobs. Footprint provides identity verification and vaulting. Runtime connects to the KYC vendors you already use and lets your teams build agents from their SOPs, so the work of analysts you were about to hire gets done with approvals and a full record.

What is the best Footprint alternative for payment companies?

If identity verification and risk alert review are the whole scope, Footprint is a strong option. If you want one agent harness across risk, compliance, payment ops, finance, support, and onboarding, in your own cloud, Runtime is built for that.

Where does Runtime fit next to Footprint?

Footprint covers identity verification, vaulting, and risk alert review. Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment and fintech teams, so it covers the work around that across support, payment ops, finance, risk, and compliance. Many teams can run both: Footprint for identity, Runtime agents for the downstream cases, with approvals before any money moves.