Key results
- Cases reviewed since integration - 21,000+
- Hours of manual work saved since integration - 52,000+
- Reduction in per case handling time - 2.5 hours
- Cost savings in year one - $3.8M
The problem: manual compliance spanning 190 jurisdictions
Voted the best crypto exchange of 2025 by Forbes, Kraken is one of the world's largest regulated cryptocurrency exchanges, operating across more than 190 jurisdictions with over 100 licenses and registrations worldwide.
Its parent company, Payward, runs seven distinct entities, each serving different customer segments across a variety of regulatory regimes. In 2025 alone, Payward launched nine new products, and several new licenses to bolster capabilities in new geographies in short succession. But growth was stalling. The company needed to scale its compliance infrastructure to meet it’s accelerating growth. Each expansion added new compliance obligations, and teams were relying on manual processes and outside contractors, was struggling to keep up.
“A lot of our programs and processing of information were based upon manual inputs — we had a lot of humans doing a lot of work.
— CJ Rinaldi, Chief Compliance Officer, Payward & Kraken
Payward’s compliance workload varied by entity, jurisdiction, and the complexity of the customers it served. With a customer base including decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and investment funds, Payward had to navigate corporate structures that may have ten or more beneficial owners. Each entity carried its own document requirements, risk framework, and high-risk country designations, so building a complete picture of any one customer required a minimum of twenty to thirty searches and as many documents to cross-reference.
Payward's internal team couldn't keep pace with the volume, so it brought in external contractors to help scale operations. But given the complexity of the compliance requirements, those contractors struggled to deliver consistent, high-quality output.
To continue to scale, Payward needed a compliance solution that could accurately manage the variation of a global, multi-entity operation and meet the high bar its regulators and clients demand.
The solution: complex automation with a regulatory backbone
After evaluating a number of compliance technology vendors, Payward chose to partner with Bretton to automate its compliance operations. What distinguished Bretton was its vision for compliance built on regulatory technology; it had the proven infrastructure capable of meeting the demands of a program as globally complex as Payward’s.
The implementation included a two to three week quality validation period, during which Bretton worked directly with Payward’s compliance team, ingesting live compliance data and mapping precise requirements across all seven entities. After intensive validation, Payward had a fully integrated solution that could seamlessly and accurately handle the complexities outsourcing was unable to.
"It felt like an extension of our control environment rather than imposing an external system that was simply layered on top of our existing program. And they're also doing this on the back of regulatory technology which is really the backbone for an effective and efficient compliance program."
— CJ Rinaldi, Chief Compliance Officer, Payward & Kraken
Operationalizing compliance across the business
Bretton automated the investigative and verification work across four areas of Payward’s compliance operations where manual processes had been most burdensome:
Document review: Before Bretton, analysts worked from large spreadsheets to identify which documents a customer needed to provide for a given entity and jurisdiction, then checked each document individually to confirm it was present. Bretton’s agents identified the requirements automatically based on entity and jurisdiction, checked which documents were provided, and flagged what was missing.
Ownership and adverse media verification: Tracing ownership chains, running adverse media checks, and verifying addresses across every associated party consumed hours of manual research per case. Bretton enabled targeted address verification and adverse media searches across every beneficial owner and associated party, completing in minutes the research that previously required twenty to thirty manual searches per customer.
Complex entity due diligence: For DAOs, investment funds, and other non-standard corporate structures, Bretton's agents identified the entity type and generated the specific due diligence questions that applied to it, from fund administrator licensing to beneficial ownership chains. They also compared what Payward already held on a customer against up to twenty to thirty submitted documents, flagging inconsistencies that manual review would likely have missed.
High-risk country screening: When Payward’s compliance team faced a new regulatory requirement for high-risk third-country screening, Bretton built and deployed a dedicated control in approximately three weeks. The control scanned customer-submitted documents and public-facing websites for references to any country on each entity's designated risk list, which varies across jurisdictions. What previously required an analyst to go through every document and check every customer website could automatically across the full customer base.
“We are not looking for tools that replace analysts — we always look for infrastructure that makes our analysts more effective and Bretton's architecture was built with this perspective in mind.”
— CJ Rinaldi, Chief Compliance Officer, Payward & Kraken
Bretton now processes approximately 2,000 cases a month for Payward across seven entities. Every case runs within defined policy constraints with a complete audit trail, and a dedicated analyst monitors output quality full time.
Results: compliance that enables global growth
In the first 90 days after launch, case volume grew 2.5 times, and Payward successfully handled the increase without adding headcount or compromising on investigation quality. Since full integration, Bretton's agents have reviewed more than 21,000 cases and recovered over 52,000 hours of manual work.
Case handling time is down 2.5 hours per review, allowing Payward to reduce its contractor workforce by 33%, from approximately 300 to 200. Analysts are now focused on the complex investigations and risk decisions that actually require human expertise.
Payward continues to grow, having recently added a new Brazilian entity to the program. It no longer has to contend with compliance complexity that slows its expansion. It finally has the operational power to support its global, multi-entity exchange at scale.
“Bretton meets the client where the client is. They don't seem to be worried about failing. They're trying to really solve client problems — which for me is exactly the type of collaboration that I want.”
— CJ Rinaldi, Chief Compliance Officer, Payward & Kraken
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