---
title: Automate enhanced due diligence checks with Sardine for faster AML reviews
source_page: https://www.sardine.ai/blog/automate-enhanced-due-diligence-checks-with-sardine
canonical: https://www.sardine.ai/blog/automate-enhanced-due-diligence-checks-with-sardine
format: text/markdown
date: 2025-10-02T00:00:00.000Z
author: Simon Taylor
description: High-risk onboarding should not stall. Automated enhanced due diligence helps AML teams trigger step-up KYC, screen sanctions, and clear EDD queues…
---

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---

# Automate enhanced due diligence checks with Sardine for faster AML reviews

**Author:** Simon Taylor · **Published:** 2025-10-02T00:00:00.000Z · **Categories:** Compliance

High-risk onboarding should not stall. Automated enhanced due diligence helps AML teams trigger step-up KYC, screen sanctions, and clear EDD queues…

For most compliance teams, Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) is where everything slows down.
You’re under pressure to move fast: onboard customers quickly, stay compliant with FinCEN and OFAC regulations, and manage a growing volume of alerts. But when high-risk signals are triggered, your team often grinds to a halt. EDD cases pile up. Manual reviews stretch into days. Legitimate customers face delays, and risky ones sometimes slip through the cracks.
Worse still, initiating EDD is often a manual process itself. Flagged by an analyst, pushed to another queue, followed by document collection, identity verification, and sanctions screening. It’s operational glue. And it's draining your team’s time, budget, and morale.
This is where automation steps in.
With Sardine, you can automatically queue users for EDD, collect and verify step-up KYC documents, and screen data with AI-powered agents without slowing down onboarding. That means less backlog, fewer false positives, and more time for your team to focus on real risk, not paperwork.
Here’s how it works. 👇
Refresher: what is enhanced due diligence 
First, a quick refresher on EDD.
Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) occurs when a financial institution or company needs to gather additional information or intelligence about a high-risk customer. It is used in high-risk scenarios where standard Customer Due Diligence (CDD) isn’t enough. 
Regulatory bodies like the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) expect organizations to understand the nature and purpose of their customer relationships for high-risk customers. 
To meet this expectation, Financial Institutions (FIs) must design and maintain an EDD policy that provides the compliance team with practical guidelines on managing these higher-risk scenarios, such as money laundering or terrorism financing. 
Enhanced due diligence has become the primary line of defence for compliance officers when faced with high-risk clients, but it is often manual, slow, and causes significant friction for good customers.
How to define an automated enhanced due diligence policy
When higher-risk clients such as Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) or cash-intensive businesses are identified during routine CDD checks, they are escalated for EDD review.
Defining an enhanced due diligence policy typically involves 
Setting risk thresholds
Establishing escalation triggers 
and determining which clients or transactions require more detailed scrutiny. 
However, many businesses still rely on manual processes for EDD, where a human operator sifts through databases, watchlists, and piles of documents to assess the risk profile of each relationship. 
These manual reviews clog up workflows, saturate compliance teams, and create delays. 
When overwhelmed with manual work, critical red flags can slip through the cracks or manual oversight, leaving institutions vulnerable. Growing backlogs of EDD cases can impact onboarding efficiency and draw regulatory attention, for example, at Danske Bank in 2017, when over EUR 200 billion in suspicious transactions slipped through manual checks, leading to a USD 2 billion fine, becoming the most severe case of money laundering in European banking history.
Automation can prevent this type of expensive error.
Automating the initiation screening step allows systems to autonomously identify, prioritize, and queue high-risk cases for enhanced due diligence, eliminating delays and the risk of missed red flags. 
Automating the next layer, step-up KYC procedures, could save time, money, and increase customer onboarding conversion.
Advanced systems like Sardine’s latest compliance product update create specific rules and conditions that trigger enhanced due diligence checks and have cut customer backlogs from upwards of 22 days, down to 2 minutes in some scenarios.
How compliance workflow automation improves step-up KYC and onboarding
Whenever an alert is triggered for a potential high-risk customer, the most common next step is “step-up KYC.” This process involves collecting documentary KYC information and checking that against numerous watch lists, risk signals ,and 3rd party data sources.
This can be automated to:
Automatically add a user to an EDD queue
Automatically request that the user provide additional step-up KYC data
With AI Agents, automatically review the documentary KYC information to screen for false positives (such as name mismatches, common names, cultural variations etc).
To show how this works in practice, imagine a Cuban American living in Miami, accessing their banking services:
On their return trip from Cuba, this customer triggers compliance alerts due to U.S. sanctions. 
Rather than immediately blocking access or causing unnecessary friction, Sardine assesses the situation in real-time and adds the user to an EDD queue.
The system needs a quick biometric scan or ID check to unlock the user from this queue to confirm the individual's identity without disrupting their experience. 
If a user’s behaviour suddenly shifts, an unusual login from a risky device or location, these systems can trigger stronger authentication measures, ensuring the transaction isn't quicksand for potential fraud. 
The key features and processes you need are to:
‍Trigger a user to be added to an EDD Queue automatically. Sardine’s Smart KYC and KYB stop fraud and criminals at the gate by automatically adding the user to a queue for step-up KYC
‍Collect additional step-up KYC data digitally. From here on, the KYC and KYB solution can collect additional documentary KYC and KYB information. Including selfie liveness checks, adding layers of security without compromising efficiency. 
‍Detect VPNs or proxies to determine True Location. These services are often used to sidestep sanctions checks and manage the inconvenience. Sardine identifies a device's True Location and True IP addresses, ensuring this cannot happen.
‍Use AI Agents to review step-up KYC/KYB information. Sardine’s AI Agents can review watch lists, sanctions lists, 3rd party data (such as telco, email, bank consortia) alongside the collected documentary KYC data to filter out false positives. In testing we’ve achieved 100% accuracy in false positive detection with AI Agents.
Enhanced due diligence automation for AML compliance teams
Manual enhanced due diligence can quickly overwhelm already stretched compliance teams. 
FIs should focus on nimble, results-driven approaches like enhanced due diligence automation, which reduce friction and tackle financial crime head-on. 
Enhanced due diligence automation, combined with simple, digital step-up KYC and KYB, automates manual work and makes the customer experience as frictionless as possible. Advanced user device screening helps identify when a VPN or proxy is masking a user's true location. 
Sardine offers a single platform that streamlines compliance processes. 
It consolidates customer identification, AML monitoring, case management, and reporting within a single interface and data set. 
If this sounds like a better solution than manual work, get in touch with us.
We’re excited to show you what we’ve built.
Oh and by the way 👇
Our Customer Identification Program provides KYC and KYB checks while simultaneously ensuring thorough CDD and EDD protocols. Sardine also supports both real-time and batch transaction monitoring, with 500+ pre-built rules that quickly flag suspicious activities.
Automated enhanced due diligence FAQs
### What is automated enhanced due diligence, and why does it matter for AML teams?
Enhanced due diligence is the deeper review process compliance teams run when standard customer due diligence isn't enough, typically for high-risk customers, politically exposed persons, sanctions exposure, or activity that may indicate financial crime. The manual version creates backlogs, slows onboarding, and leaves compliance teams buried in paperwork instead of focused on real risk. Automation routes high-risk cases through defined workflows, collects step-up KYC documents, screens sanctions and watchlists, and keeps a clear audit trail, without stalling the onboarding experience for legitimate customers.
### How does compliance workflow automation improve step-up KYC?
When a high-risk signal is triggered, step-up KYC means collecting additional documentary evidence and screening it against watchlists, sanctions lists, and third-party data sources. Done manually, that process creates queues that stretch into days. Automated compliance workflows handle the trigger, queue assignment, document collection, and initial screening without analyst intervention. Reviewers only touch the cases that genuinely need human judgment. In practice, this can cut case backlogs from weeks down to minutes.
### How do AI agents for compliance reduce false positives in EDD reviews?
A significant portion of EDD alerts are false positives, common name matches, cultural name variations, or mismatches that don't represent actual risk. AI agents can review documentary KYC information alongside sanctions lists, PEP databases, and third-party data sources to identify and clear these cases automatically. That frees compliance analysts to focus on the alerts that carry real risk rather than spending time manually clearing obvious mismatches.
### How does device intelligence support sanctions screening in an EDD workflow?
Bad actors frequently use VPNs and proxies to mask their physical location and sidestep sanctions checks during onboarding. Standard KYC and transaction monitoring often miss this. Device intelligence identifies a device's true location and true IP address, which means a customer appearing to access services from a low-risk location can be flagged if the device signals tell a different story. That layer of verification strengthens sanctions screening without adding friction for legitimate users.
### What is the difference between customer due diligence and enhanced due diligence?
Customer due diligence confirms who the customer is and establishes a baseline risk profile. Enhanced due diligence goes further, collecting additional documents, reviewing source of funds, unwinding ownership structures, screening watchlists and PEP lists, and applying ongoing monitoring. EDD is triggered when standard CDD isn't sufficient, typically for higher-risk customers, jurisdictions, or activity patterns that may indicate money laundering or sanctions exposure.