How Ninth Wave built AI-powered open finance onboarding on Amazon Bedrock
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Ninth Wave built Compass, an AI-enabled onboarding assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, to improve open finance onboarding for financial institutions. Open finance lets banks share customer-authorized financial data with third-party applications through standardized APIs, but each bank exposes APIs with different field names, formatting, and gaps relative to the Financial Data Exchange (FDX) standard, making API validation, field mapping, and readiness scoring traditionally slow and specialist-intensive. Ninth Wave provides secure data connectivity and normalizes bank APIs to FDX standards, connecting institutions to aggregators such as Plaid, Finicity, and MX and accounting systems including Intuit QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage. Compass is a collaborative self-service portal for bank engineers, aggregator integration teams, and Ninth Wave’s onboarding team, designed to improve efficiency, deliver governed AI to external partners, and maintain financial-services compliance including least-privilege access, encryption, SOC 2, and PCI DSS alignment. Ninth Wave chose a multi-agent architecture on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with Strands Agents for orchestration after evaluating self-hosted models on Amazon EC2 and a single-agent RAG pattern. The architecture uses intent-based routing, per-task model selection, and tenant-scoped grounding, with a primary Compass Agent routing to seven specialists for search, documentation Q&A, document classification, field mapping, analysis, interactive workflows, and readiness analysis. The solution includes per-tenant OpenSearch indices and S3 prefixes, CloudFront and AWS WAF edge security, OAuth2/OIDC authentication with MFA, cross-account IAM roles, deterministic FDX readiness scoring in application code, and observability through CloudWatch, SNS, and Grafana. Ninth Wave delivered Compass in five sprints, onboarded beta clients on March 1, 2026, readied production on May 15, 2026, and reached general availability on June 1, 2026.
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