Runtime vs Footprint
Runtime is one agent harness for every payment team, from risk to payment ops, finance, and support. Footprint is an identity and risk operations platform with AI agents for KYC, KYB, and fraud.
TL;DR: Runtime is the stronger choice when you want one harness for every team that touches a transaction, so risk, payment ops, finance, and support share one platform and one memory, in your cloud. Footprint is a good fit for identity verification and risk operations with a purpose-built risk analyst agent.
| Feature |  Runtime |  Footprint |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Agent harness for every payment team | Identity and risk platform with AI analysts |
| Teams covered | Risk, compliance, payment ops, finance, support, onboarding | Risk, fraud, and compliance |
| Identity verification and vaulting | Connects to your KYC vendors | Built in |
| Purpose-built risk analyst agent | You build it from your SOPs | Out of the box |
| Shared memory across teams | One governed memory for every team | Within risk operations |
| Runs in your cloud | Yes, or fully self-hosted | Hosted platform |
| Bring your own models | Any model, including local open models | Vendor-managed |
| Audit trail | Every query, tool call, approval, and cost | Auditable investigations |
| Forward-deployed engineers | Included for rollouts | Vendor onboarding |
Two different jobs
Runtime is the AI agent harness for payment teams. From payment ops to risk, compliance, and support, anyone on the team can build agents that work their queues on their own computers inside your cloud, called from Slack, Teams, email, SMS, or voice, with approvals and a full audit trail.
Footprint is an identity and risk operations company. It unifies KYC, KYB, fraud detection, authentication, and secure vaulting, and offers Percy, an AI agent that works as a risk analyst: alert triage, evidence collection, document extraction, and first drafts of SAR narratives.
Both are good products. The right one depends on the work you're trying to hand off.
Why payment teams choose Runtime
Built for money movement
Payment work is mostly exceptions: a held payout, an ACH return with an odd code, a dispute where the evidence contradicts the claim. Runtime agents reason through those cases on their own computers, across your ledger, processor, bank files, and tickets, and stop for a person before anything moves money.
Your data stays yours
Agent computers run in your AWS, GCP, or Azure account, or you self-host the whole platform. Card numbers, SSNs, and secrets are masked before any prompt or log, and you can serve open-weight models locally for PCI and PII work.
One harness for every team
Support, payment ops, finance, risk, and compliance all build on the same harness, so one stuck payment is one investigation, not four. Every run is stored with its evidence, approvals, and cost, ready when an auditor or sponsor bank asks.
An engineer, not an account executive
A forward-deployed AI engineer who has built payment infrastructure maps your processes, builds the first agents with your team, and sets up guardrails.
When Footprint makes sense
- You need identity verification, KYC/KYB, and vaulting from one vendor
- Your main bottleneck is risk and compliance alert review
- You want an opinionated, purpose-built risk analyst agent
- Other teams aren't in scope for agents yet
When Runtime makes sense
- You run payments, banking, or lending operations and the queue keeps growing
- The work needs judgment on exceptions, not just a fixed sequence of steps
- Card data or PII has to stay in your environment
- You need approvals on money movement and an audit trail your sponsor bank will accept
- You want one platform for every team that touches a transaction
See Runtime on your busiest queue
Bring one SOP. A forward-deployed AI engineer builds the first agent with your team, inside your cloud.