Hawk Expands Agentic AI Suite with CDD Agent to Eliminate Bandwidth Bottlenecks & Enhance Regulatory Defensibility

New agentic AI solution unifies KYC, AML, and screening data to automate periodic reviews, pre-populate due diligence forms, and eliminate multi-year blind spots in customer risk monitoring. 

Hawk, the leading provider of AI-powered anti-money laundering (AML), screening, and fraud prevention solutions, today introduced its Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Agent. Expanding Hawk's growing Agentic AI platform, the CDD Agent enables financial institutions to eliminate CDD review backlogs, move from static, time-based periodic reviews toward continuous customer risk assessment, and drive consistency across their customer due diligence process. 

The US FinCEN CDD Rule, the UK Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and the EU Anti-Money Laundering Directives require financial institutions to monitor customers on an ongoing, risk-based basis.  

However, analyst bandwidth constraints force compliance operations into multi-year review cycles, often reviewing high-risk accounts only once per year and low-risk accounts as infrequently as once every five years. In between, ownership changes, risk profiles shift, and transactional anomalies go undetected—leaving institutions unknowingly carrying significant risk for years. When reviews do happen, analysts spend most of their time copying data between systems, re-assessing known risks, and writing inconsistent, unstructured notes that create audit exposure. 

The Hawk CDD Agent resolves these operational, risk detection, and governance challenges by acting as an intelligent, context-aware due diligence assistant. Running on an institution's pre-approved policies and guardrails, the agent ingests data across systems, conducts preliminary due diligence, and hands analysts a pre-populated review complete with structured narratives, AI explanations, and traceable citations. 

"CDD teams don't need another generic risk scoring tool, and they don't just need faster data entry; they need the capacity to catch and address risk promptly, with the governance to defend every decision," said Wolfgang Berner, CPO and Co-Founder of Hawk.

"When analysts spend hours toggling between tools to copy data by hand, review quality suffers, critical risk shifts go unnoticed, and audit trails become fragmented and incomplete. By adding agentic AI to the customer due diligence workflow, we are giving institutions the ability to pull together KYC, screening, and AML signals instantly.”

“The CDD Agent handles the heavy lifting of data compilation and form population, allowing analysts to focus their expertise on high-value risk judgments while ensuring every decision is fully documented and audit-ready."

Core Capabilities and Operational Value 

• Risk Signal Aggregation: Unifies critical Know Your Customer (KYC) profile updates (such as ownership structures, document expirations, and activity discrepancies) with screening hits and AML transaction alerts into a single, comprehensive risk assessment. 
• Automated Assessment of Entity Risks and Discrepancies: Cross-references declared KYC profiles against actual transaction behavior, uncovers hidden beneficial ownership and shared registry links, and synthesizes notable activity into an instant investigation summary—replacing hours of manual data gathering with deeper, automated analysis that enables compliance teams to review accounts far more frequently. 
• Dynamic CDD & EDD Form Population: Fills out standard institutional review templates and forms and automatically triggers Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) the moment elevated risk thresholds are crossed, replacing empty form filling and manual handoffs with a proofread-and-approve workflow. 
• Network Analysis & Entity Relationship Visualization: Automatically maps and visualizes corporate structures, multi-layered ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) chains, and shared customer attributes based on available customer data and publicly available information like corporate registries and adverse media—exposing concealed risk relationships and indirect exposure that isolated customer records fail to reveal. 
• Traceable Reasoning & Audit-Ready Citations: Provides structured natural language summaries for all risks identified, backed by clickable citations for fast verification and seamless regulatory examinations. 
• Enterprise Security & Governance: Works securely and seamlessly with a bank’s existing set up. The agent is LLM-agnostic, operates strictly under human-in-the-loop controls, and never closes, escalates, or submits a case without human approval. Data remains protected and is never pooled with other institutions, moved outside the environment, or used to train foundation models. 

Learn more about the CDD Agent