Subtext Blog
Insights on merchant risk, compliance, and building trust in payments.
Industry
Why registry data alone can't tell you if a merchant is legitimate
Government registries confirm that a business exists. They don't confirm what it does, whether it's actively operating, or whether its web presence matches its registration. For compliance teams, that gap is where risk lives.
Sarah Chen
Head, Product
Drew Donald
Head, Compliance
The real cost of slow merchant onboarding (and how to measure it)
Every day a legitimate merchant spends in your review queue is a day they're considering your competitor. Here's how to calculate the revenue impact of onboarding delays — and where automation makes the biggest difference.
Introducing Compliance Reports: from risk detection to audit-ready documentation
Detecting merchant risk is one problem. Documenting it for regulators and card networks is another. Compliance Reports bridge that gap — packaging every finding from screening, monitoring, and investigation into formatted, timestamped reports.
KYB in 2026: what's changed and what payment providers should do about it
Merchant verification used to mean checking registry data and calling it done. New card network rules, evolving fraud patterns, and AI-powered tools have changed what 'sufficient' due diligence looks like. Here's what's shifted.
Designing an API that returns a risk decision in 30 seconds
Under the hood of Subtext's screening engine: how we analyze 2,000+ web sources, run sentiment analysis, and deliver a structured report in a single API call — and the tradeoffs we made to hit a 30-second SLA.
Transaction laundering is getting harder to detect. Here's what compliance teams are missing.
The most sophisticated laundering schemes don't look like fraud at first glance — they look like normal businesses with real websites and real customers. The signals are in the details that manual review consistently overlooks.