When Natasha Vernier raised $11 million for her compliance automation startup in May 2023, she was selling what sounded like an expensive fix to a problem banks didn't think they had. Her pitch: most financial institutions test only about 10% of their anti-money laundering controls—what if you could test all of them, continuously, without drowning your team in manual work?
Nearly two years on, that gamble appears to be paying off. Cable, the San Francisco RegTech firm Vernier co-founded, has signed up a string of banks including BankProv, Grasshopper, and Academy Bank—institutions suddenly eager to automate compliance oversight of their fintech partnerships as regulators circle with increasing intensity.
The Series A round, led by Stage 2 Capital and Jump Capital with participation from existing backer CRV, pushed Cable's total funding past $16 million. More telling than the dollar figure was the timing.
When the Tide Turned
Stage 2's Dan Heck called Cable "critical infrastructure" when announcing the investment. Within weeks, his instinct proved prescient—or lucky, depending on your view. Federal regulators issued interagency guidance in June 2023 on third-party risk management, effectively putting every bank-fintech partnership under a regulatory magnifying glass.
What followed was a cascade of enforcement actions that validated Cable's thesis faster than anyone expected. The OCC hit Blue Ridge Bank with a consent order in January 2024 for BSA/AML deficiencies tied to fintech partnerships. By October, American Banker reported that Florida's Axiom Bank—an early Cable customer from January 2023—had received a formal regulatory agreement to beef up its AML oversight. The timing wasn't coincidental: Axiom had brought Cable aboard in 2023 for continuous compliance testing, according to the report.
Suddenly, what Cable was selling didn't sound theoretical anymore.
The Unsexy Problem Banks Actually Pay to Solve
Cable automates what regulators call "effectiveness testing"—the independent audits required under the Bank Secrecy Act to verify that financial crime controls do what they're supposed to do. In practice, this has traditionally meant compliance teams manually sampling a slice of accounts and transactions (10% is common) to check whether monitoring systems catch suspicious activity.
It's tedious work. It doesn't scale. And when a bank is managing multiple fintech partners—each processing thousands or millions of transactions—a 10% sample starts to feel less like due diligence and more like wishful thinking.
Cable's platform integrates via API to test every transaction in real time, surfacing control failures as they occur. Think of it as continuous quality assurance for compliance programs. Vernier, who built the financial crime function at UK challenger bank Monzo, and her co-founder, who led risk at Square Europe, had both watched banks struggle with the same gap: compliance frameworks that looked impressive on paper but couldn't demonstrate effectiveness at volume.
The Numbers, When They Matter
Since the raise, Cable has published case studies with specifics that compliance officers pay attention to. BankProv switched to Cable in July 2024 and increased transaction testing coverage from roughly 10% to 100%. Grasshopper Bank claimed to save more than 50 hours per fintech partner annually while hitting full test coverage, according to a December 2024 case study quoting CRO Chris Mastrangelo.
Ramp Network, a crypto on-and-off-ramp (yes, those still exist), moved from about 1% manual sampling to 100% automated testing, per a case study from December 2023. Business banking fintech Meow integrated Cable in under eight weeks and used it to support a tenfold jump in monthly applications, a June 2024 case study showed.
Whether those efficiency gains translate to actual risk reduction is harder to quantify—compliance, after all, is often about proving a negative. But for banks staring down consent orders or examiner questions about their fintech partnerships, the pitch is straightforward: demonstrate to regulators that your controls work on every single transaction, not just the ones you happened to sample.
Recent Momentum
The customer list has expanded, particularly in recent months. Wolf & Company, a national CPA and advisory firm, announced a strategic partnership to integrate Cable's testing across its bank and credit union clients. Academy Bank selected Cable to automate BSA compliance testing for fintech partnerships, citing the need for "enhanced oversight" in a press release.
Jump Capital's Tarun Gupta had pointed to "founder-market fit" when explaining his firm's investment in 2023, emphasizing the founders' frontline experience at Monzo and Square. The customer pipeline now skews heavily toward banks navigating precisely the oversight challenges those founders encountered—except at a scale that makes manual testing impractical, if not impossible.
The Build-Out
Cable used the Series A capital to expand across product, engineering, data science, and sales teams, according to the funding announcement. The platform now supports regulatory frameworks beyond BSA/AML, including UK Money Laundering Regulations, Bermuda Financial Crime Regulations, and U.S. consumer protection rules like Regulation E and Regulation Z.
The broader question is whether Cable's category—continuous compliance testing—becomes table stakes or remains a premium solution for banks with complex partnership portfolios. Right now, momentum favors the former. For institutions already under consent orders, or those watching peers get hit with enforcement actions, Cable's value proposition doesn't require much elaboration.
Prove your controls work. On every transaction. Without doubling your compliance headcount.
In a regulatory environment where "trust us, we're monitoring it" no longer cuts it, that's infrastructure banks seem willing to pay for.
