COLIBRIX ONE Selects Vivox AI to Automate Merchant KYB Compliance

COLIBRIX ONE, the payments infrastructure platform within the Mellifera group, has partnered with Vivox AI under a multi-year contract to automate know-your-business verification for its UK and European merchant portfolio. The arrangement aims to cut the hours compliance teams spend reviewing business documents during onboarding, though final sign-off will remain with human analysts.

Vivox AI's agents will handle corporate document checks, ultimate beneficial owner identification, and sanctions plus adverse media screening. Each AI-generated conclusion will be traceable to its data source, and COLIBRIX ONE's compliance officers will review and approve every case before closure. The initial rollout covers merchant onboarding across UK and EU markets, with plans to expand into ongoing monitoring and further entity categories in 2027.

The vendor's AI agents pull data from corporate registries in more than 155 countries to map ownership chains, shareholders, and directors, then produce a complete customer due diligence or enhanced due diligence report for review. In an earlier deployment at cross-border payments firm TransferMate, Vivox AI reported that due diligence time dropped from approximately 60 minutes to under 15 minutes per case, with screening alerts falling by 86 per cent. Those performance figures come from Vivox AI's own account of the TransferMate project and have not been verified by an independent party.

AI agents take on the document-heavy due diligence work where every conclusion comes with a clear audit trail, so analysts stay in control and regulators can see exactly how a decision was reached. That is what makes AI usable in a regulated business.

COLIBRIX ONE holds electronic money institution authorisation from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 927920) and operates under a parallel licence issued by the Malta Financial Services Authority through Mellifera Kartiera Limited. Its product suite includes card acquiring for one-off and subscription payments, multi-currency accounts with named IBANs, and international payouts, backed by principal memberships at Visa and Mastercard.

The move comes as payment platforms face growing scrutiny from UK and EU financial crime supervisors. The FCA has raised its expectations for anti-money laundering controls and merchant due diligence at e-money institutions in recent years, while the EU's AML package—including the new AML Authority—will impose stricter baseline requirements across member states. For platforms competing on speed, manual KYB for merchants with tangled, cross-border ownership structures creates a real operational choke point.

The market for AI-powered compliance tools is growing rapidly. Both established regtech players and AI-native startups are racing to automate the same document-intensive workflows, often emphasising explainability and audit trail quality as the features that make their systems acceptable to risk teams and regulators. COLIBRIX ONE's decision to engage a specialist AI compliance vendor rather than bundle the function into its existing technology stack mirrors a wider trend among licensed payment firms: treating the compliance layer as a modular component that can be replaced as the technology evolves.

The critical test will be whether the efficiency gains reported in the TransferMate reference translate to a larger and more diverse merchant book, especially for businesses with multi-layered holding structures in higher-risk jurisdictions. Mapping beneficial ownership in those cases is the hardest part of KYB work, and regulatory tolerance for mistakes is at its lowest.