Hickory puts AI agents inside the compliance casework queue

Banks adopting AI for compliance can still end up paying for the old software underneath it. Hickory & Company is taking a broader approach: replacing the transaction-monitoring and case-management platform itself, with AI agents built into the work.

In its Y Combinator launch announcement, the company describes workflows that collect evidence, prepare documentation and suggest decisions for compliance teams. A chat interface lets employees work through cases, while a knowledge base assembled by compliance specialists supplies context.

Founder Joshua Howland previously co-founded Seis, the banking startup serving Spanish-speaking customers. Hickory’s pitch reflects a problem he says the team encountered firsthand: institutions relying on expensive, disconnected tools and substantial manual work to keep compliance operations moving.

The company says its platform preserves evidence and reasoning in an audit trail, and gives compliance staff direct access to reporting. It also claims teams can process queues ten times faster. That figure is a company claim; the launch does not provide enough detail to independently assess the comparison.

The product’s central proposition is straightforward: put the investigation, supporting material and next action in one place. For banks evaluating it, the important question is how that approach performs on their own cases and review requirements.

Watch Hickory’s original launch demo.