Trust, Transparency, and AI-Native Innovation | Flagright & B4B Payments

Baran Ozkan, co-founder of Flagright, reflects on the company’s early days starting with Y Combinator, an experience that gave them credibility and a strong network to kickstart growth. From day one, Flagright has had to prove it could be trusted in the compliance and security space, where startups often face skepticism. Okzan highlights how their focus has been on building long-term trust, through ISO and SOC2 certifications, and a strong belief in transparency and reliability.

Flagright’s core mission is to modernize AML compliance using generative AI and their “AI-native AML compliance” approach isn’t a gimmick. Having come from the buyer side himself, Okzan wanted to build a solution that’s honest and actually eliminates the repetitive tasks that dominate compliance work. It’s not just about efficiency, it’s about delivering value to the lives of the people doing the work.

Luke McAlpine from B4B Payments talks about the company’s next phase, following its acquisition by Banking Circle. Their priority is scale, but with a forward-looking lens. McAlpine says B4B is actively rethinking how their users interact with its products. While web and mobile interfaces are the standard now, B4B Payments are now exploring whether natural language interfaces (NLX) or AI agents might take over in the near future.

He also points to changes in developer experience and while APIs still matter, new protocols like MCP could reshape how engineers, or even AI agents, connect to financial systems. These shifts raise some big questions: Will traditional UIs become less relevant? Will developers need to code at all, or just prompt AI agents?

Both Flagright and B4B Payments are focused on building for what’s next, whether that’s scaling trust in a risk-averse industry or reshaping engagement through AI and automation.