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SaaS companies remain accountable for the financial activities they place inside their software. Embedding payments, wallets, lending or deposit features does not transfer responsibility for KYC, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, fraud response, reporting or records. The workable approach is to treat the arrangement as a regulated bank–fintech third-party relationship: map every product flow and jurisdiction, assign each control to a named entity, contract for evidence and access, monitor the partner continuously, and maintain a tested exit plan.
This guide focuses on U.S. arrangements, including banking-as-a-service programs. State, international and product-specific rules can add obligations, so a launch decision should include advice on the exact products, customers and locations involved.
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What makes embedded finance a compliance problem for SaaS companies?
Embedded finance combines a software user experience with regulated money movement. A customer may see one SaaS brand, while a sponsor bank, licensed payment institution, processor and several subcontractors perform the underlying activities. Regulators evaluate the activity and the control environment, not merely which logo appears on the screen.
The July 25, 2024 joint statement from the Federal Reserve, FDIC and OCC describes bank arrangements with third parties that deliver deposit products and services, commonly called banking-as-a-service or embedded finance. The agencies’ May 3, 2024 third-party-risk guidance sets a lifecycle of planning, due diligence, contract negotiation, ongoing monitoring and termination. A SaaS company should use that lifecycle even when a licensed partner performs the regulated function.
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- Accountability follows the activity. Outsourcing customer identification or monitoring does not eliminate the need to oversee how it is done or to retain evidence that it worked.
- Every flow has a different risk. Card acceptance, ACH credits, instant payments, stored balances and business payouts have different fraud, dispute, sanctions and record-retention implications.
- Evidence matters as much as policy. Regulators and auditors will expect decisions, exceptions, alerts, investigations, approvals and changes to be traceable to a responsible person or system.
Who is responsible for KYC, AML and fraud controls?
Responsibility should be allocated by activity in a control matrix and mirrored in operating procedures and contracts. The bank or licensed institution may own a regulatory filing, but the SaaS platform can still create risk through onboarding design, customer communications, data quality or access management.
| Activity | Questions to assign in writing | Evidence to retain |
|---|---|---|
| Customer identification and verification | Who collects identity data, verifies beneficial owners, handles failures and approves exceptions? | Application data, verification results, manual-review notes and decision timestamps |
| Sanctions and watchlist screening | Which lists and geographies are screened, at onboarding and during the relationship, and who resolves matches? | Screening results, list versions, disposition rationale and escalation records |
| Transaction monitoring | Who defines scenarios, sets thresholds, reviews alerts and documents tuning? | Rules or model versions, alert populations, investigator notes and quality checks |
| Suspicious-activity reporting | Which regulated entity files, who supplies facts, and how is sensitive report data restricted? | Case files, information requests, approvals and controlled-access logs |
| Disputes and reimbursement | Who receives claims, pauses funds, communicates with customers and bears the loss? | Case timelines, customer notices, network decisions and payment records |
| Records and retention | Which entity stores each record, for how long, in which location and in what retrievable format? | Retention schedule, deletion logs, legal holds and retrieval tests |
Do not describe a partner as “handling compliance” without naming the specific controls, service levels and handoffs. A SaaS company still needs internal ownership for product decisions, data supplied to the partner, customer support and escalation.
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Start with a written inventory. The inventory becomes the baseline for licensing analysis, partner selection, testing and incident response.
- List every product capability. Include accepting payments, initiating payouts, holding balances, issuing cards, lending, payroll-like disbursements, foreign exchange and virtual accounts. Record whether funds ever touch an account controlled by the SaaS company.
- Draw each funds flow. Show payer, payee, account owner, processor, ledger, settlement account, payment rail and point at which a transaction can be stopped or reversed.
- Identify customers and jurisdictions. Separate consumers, sole proprietors, companies, marketplaces and regulated businesses. Mark every state and country in which the service, customer or beneficiary is located.
- Inventory data. Record identity attributes, beneficial-owner information, device and session signals, payment credentials, geolocation, support transcripts and investigation data. Note who can access each field.
- Map controls to entities. For each step, name the SaaS owner, bank or fintech owner, processor, subcontractor, escalation contact and required evidence. Flag any control with no owner.
- Set launch gates. Require completed due diligence, tested failure handling, approved customer disclosures, data-retention decisions and a documented incident path before enabling real funds.
How do you choose and monitor a sponsor bank or fintech partner?
Use a risk-based comparison rather than selecting solely on API features or price. The interagency lifecycle expects planning, due diligence, contracting, monitoring and termination; each stage should produce an approval record.
| Comparison area | What to verify |
|---|---|
| Regulatory perimeter | Licenses, charter or agency status, permitted activities, geographic coverage and responsibility for filings |
| Financial-crime program | KYC/KYB, beneficial-owner checks, sanctions coverage, transaction monitoring, quality assurance and independent testing |
| Fraud capability | Authentication options, device and behavioral signals, model governance, explainability, false-positive management and manual review |
| Investigations | Case-management workflow, evidence export, escalation times, suspicious-activity information sharing and restricted access |
| Operational resilience | API availability targets, recovery objectives, incident communications, backup procedures and capacity during payment spikes |
| Data and subcontractors | Data location, retention, deletion, encryption, subprocessors, breach notification and audit access |
| Commercial and exit terms | Per-account and per-transaction charges, reserves, termination assistance, data portability, wind-down support and customer communication duties |
Ask for recent independent assessments, material incident summaries, regulatory examination findings that can be shared, model-change procedures and evidence that the partner tests excluded populations and exception queues. Verify that the partner can support your highest-risk customer segment, not only an average account.
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What should the contract require?
A contract should turn the control matrix into enforceable duties. It should specify who performs each activity, the standard to be met, the evidence delivered, the time allowed for escalation and the remedy when performance fails.
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- Set onboarding, screening, monitoring, dispute and reporting service levels, including coverage hours and emergency contacts.
- Require prompt notice of security incidents, regulatory inquiries, material model changes, subcontractor changes and service degradation.
- Provide audit, information and testing rights, including access to source records and evidence needed for a regulator or independent reviewer.
- Restrict subcontracting unless the SaaS company receives notice and can assess the new provider’s risks.
- Specify data ownership, retention, retrieval format, deletion and legal-hold procedures.
- Define suspension, reserve and reimbursement mechanics so a fraud event does not produce an improvised response.
- Include termination triggers, transition assistance, customer-notification duties, reconciliation and a timetable for returning or securely deleting data.
How should KYC, KYB and access controls be designed?
Use risk-based identity controls that match the product and customer. A low-value domestic payment flow may justify different verification from a business account that can send large, irreversible payouts, but every exception needs a documented rationale.
Customer and business verification
- Collect legal name, address, date of birth or formation, tax identifiers and beneficial-owner details appropriate to the customer type.
- Verify information through reliable sources and route mismatches, synthetic identities and unverifiable businesses to manual review.
- Screen customers and relevant parties against applicable sanctions and high-risk indicators at onboarding and when information changes.
- Refresh due diligence on a risk schedule and after triggers such as ownership changes, unusual activity, adverse information or a long period of inactivity.
Administrator and user authentication
The OCC’s Fall 2024 Risk Perspective identifies authentication and customer identification and verification as core fraud controls. Require phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication for administrators, separate privileged accounts from everyday accounts, enforce least privilege and review access after role changes. Device, session, velocity and impossible-travel signals can trigger step-up verification, but they should support—not replace—identity proofing.
How do you monitor transactions and suspicious activity?
Monitoring must cover the population that can actually move or receive funds. A data-governance failure that silently excludes a payment rail, customer type or geography can create a false sense of compliance.
- Define scenarios and thresholds. Consider velocity, amount, beneficiary changes, account age, device reuse, geolocation, unusual login patterns and links among accounts. Document why each threshold is appropriate.
- Test coverage. Reconcile the monitoring population to the ledger and processor reports. Test that rejected, pending, reversed, refunded and manually adjusted transactions are represented.
- Review alerts consistently. Set triage priorities, investigator procedures, quality sampling and escalation deadlines. Preserve the facts considered and the reason for closing a case.
- Control exclusions. Approve every suppression or whitelisted rule, set an expiry date and review its effect on detection.
- Protect suspicious-activity data. Limit access to reports and related case information, log access and prevent customer-facing staff from disclosing protected details.
- Report and improve. The regulated filing entity should receive complete, timely information. Feed confirmed fraud, false positives and investigation findings into rule and model tuning.
There is no universally applicable embedded-finance fraud-loss percentage in the cited U.S. regulatory material. Use your own loss, alert, decision-time and recovery data, segmented by product and customer, rather than an invented industry benchmark.
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How can a SaaS platform reduce account takeover and payment fraud?
Layer controls across the account lifecycle. No single score or vendor decision is reliable against phishing, social engineering, synthetic identities and compromised administrator credentials.
- Protect enrollment and password recovery with phishing-resistant authentication, rate limits, bot controls and re-verification for high-risk changes.
- Require step-up verification before adding a beneficiary, changing payout details, exporting sensitive data or initiating an unusual transfer.
- Use device, network, session and behavioral signals to identify automation, credential stuffing and impossible travel.
- Separate approval and execution for high-value or sensitive actions; require a second authorized person where the risk warrants it.
- Alert customers promptly about new devices, credential changes, beneficiary additions and payment initiation, using channels that attackers cannot easily alter.
- Train support teams to follow an identity-verification script and to avoid revealing which fraud signal triggered a block.
What is different about faster or irreversible payments?
Speed compresses the time available to detect, investigate and contact a customer. The OCC notes that criminals exploit streamlined payment capabilities and the irreversible or irrevocable nature of some peer-to-peer payments. Controls must therefore operate before release as well as after settlement.
Before release
Use risk-based holds, beneficiary cooling-off periods, transaction limits and step-up authentication. Route high-risk combinations to manual review with a defined maximum review time. Do not freeze every unusual payment indefinitely; distinguish a short protective hold from an account closure and document the reason.
After release
Maintain an emergency escalation path to the bank, processor and relevant payment network. Define when to recall or freeze funds, how to contact the customer, how to preserve evidence and how to handle reimbursement or dispute claims. Measure time to detect, investigate, notify and resolve, and review misses after each material incident.
How should data, models and third parties be governed?
Financial features depend on interconnected systems, so a change in an identity provider, ledger, model or cloud service can alter compliance risk. The FFIEC’s September 29, 2024 updated booklet emphasizes governance, risk management, secure development, maintenance, change management and the risks created by interconnected assets and third-party service providers.
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- Maintain a data dictionary and lineage from customer input through decision, ledger entry and report.
- Validate fraud and monitoring models before production and at defined intervals; test performance across relevant customer segments and document limitations.
- Use approvals, test evidence, rollback plans and post-change monitoring for rules, models, APIs, schemas and access policies.
- Review vendor security, resilience, subcontractors and recovery tests proportionate to the service’s criticality.
- Keep independent testing separate from the team that built or tuned the control.
How do you monitor the relationship after launch?
Ongoing oversight should be scheduled and event-driven. A quarterly meeting alone is not a monitoring program.
- Operational metrics: onboarding completion and failure rates, alert aging, review backlogs, dispute aging, uptime, reconciliation breaks and incident-response times.
- Control metrics: screening coverage, excluded records, stale due-diligence files, privileged-access reviews, model drift and overdue remediation.
- Event triggers: regulatory findings, material outages, fraud spikes, ownership changes, new products, new jurisdictions, subcontractor changes or unexplained shifts in approval rates.
- Evidence reviews: sample cases, reconcile partner reports to internal ledgers, test customer notifications and verify that contractual information rights work in practice.
Maintain a documented risk rating and remediation log. Escalate unresolved issues to senior management and, where appropriate, the board or risk committee. The partner should not be able to unilaterally change a critical control without notice and review.
What should the exit and wind-down plan cover?
Plan for a partner failure, license loss, cyber incident, insolvency or strategic decision to switch providers. Identify an alternate provider or an orderly shutdown path before launch.
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- Map how customers, balances, pending transactions, disputes, records and reports will move or be closed.
- Test data export, reconciliation and secure deletion using realistic volumes.
- Prepare customer, regulator, processor and bank communications with clear ownership.
- Set post-termination retention, investigation and support obligations so unresolved cases do not disappear with the contract.
How should teams keep the legal inventory current?
Assign an owner to track federal banking-agency, FinCEN, CFPB and state developments by product and geography. The CFPB recorded withdrawals of multiple guidance documents on May 12, 2025; that change illustrates why an old checklist cannot substitute for current legal analysis. Its January 14, 2025 compendium can help locate materials, but it is an index rather than advice for a particular product.
At each scheduled review—and whenever the product, partner, customer base or geography changes—reconfirm licensing assumptions, disclosures, reporting duties, privacy and retention rules, money-transmission requirements, sanctions scope and consumer-protection obligations. Record the source, effective date, interpretation, decision owner and next review date.
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What does a launch-ready control set look like?
- A product-and-jurisdiction inventory with funds-flow diagrams
- A signed responsibility matrix covering KYC/KYB, sanctions, monitoring, investigations, disputes, reporting and retention
- Completed partner due diligence, approval and contract schedules
- Tested onboarding, authentication, payment holds, incident and customer-notification procedures
- Monitoring scenarios, model validation, exclusion reviews and case-quality testing
- Access-control, data-lineage, retention and secure-deletion evidence
- Resilience, reconciliation, recovery and exit tests
- A calendar for legal updates, partner reviews, independent testing and management reporting
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a SaaS company need its own banking or money-transmitter license?
It depends on the activities, flow of funds, contractual structure and jurisdictions. A partner’s license does not automatically cover conduct by the SaaS company, so obtain a product-specific legal analysis before advertising or operating the feature.
How often should a SaaS company refresh partner due diligence?
There is no single regulator-prescribed interval for every arrangement. Set a risk-based cycle and refresh immediately after a material incident, regulatory finding, ownership or subcontractor change, new product, new geography or significant control change.
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Keep an indexed evidence set linking each control to its owner: policies, contracts, approvals, samples, alert and case records, model validation, access reviews, reconciliation results, incident timelines, training and remediation closure. Make sure records can be retrieved without relying on a departing partner employee.
Can automated fraud models make final decisions without human review?
Automation can prioritize or stop transactions, but governance should define when a person must review, how customers can challenge an outcome and how errors are measured. Validate performance across relevant segments and monitor drift after data, product or model changes.
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