Up to 83% faster case review: How Willow Wealth scales high-stakes decisioning with Taktile

Willow Wealth, a curated marketplace bringing institutional-grade investing to individuals, needed its case review process to scale with the business without slowing down or adding headcount. With Taktile, the team achieved:

Real estate, private credit, private equity — for decades, these were reserved for institutions. Willow Wealth (formerly Yieldstreet) opens them to individuals and offers a smarter way in: a professionally managed model portfolio or direct investments for those who’d rather build their own. Since its founding in 2015, over $6B has moved through the platform, with every deal vetted before it reaches an investor, and every investor vetted too. That's where Financial Crimes Manager Chris DelBianco comes in: he built Willow Wealth's fraud function from scratch in 2022 and oversees all of its customer transactions. 

With Willow Wealth’s 500K+ investor business expanding, Chris knew the volume, frequency, and complexity of every decision in his queue would only grow with it. And that meant rethinking the entire review process. Prior to using Taktile, manual reviews required checks across six or seven systems. Those included Looker reports, the investor's portfolio, their bank account details, and login history — up to an hour of work for any complex case. Even with all the extensive tooling, much of the data behind it came from third parties and offered little insight or nuance: risk scores came back as a simple pass or fail, with no transparency on how a score was reached and no granular visibility into which clients had been approved and why. 

With Willow Wealth launching new products that would allow investors to deposit, withdraw, and move funds themselves, Chris knew that self-service freedom for the customers would trigger a surge in transaction volume he’d have to keep up with. He needed a way to scale his decision-making without expanding the team or pulling engineers off other priorities, especially as more money moved through the platform and his caseload multiplied.

The solution wasn't more reviewers, but rather a better way to review. Understanding the risk behind a single customer or transaction meant piecing together signals from a string of third-party systems, including risk-score providers that returned a bare pass or fail, with no visibility into how the decision was reached. 

So Chris went looking for something that would actually show him what was happening in every case and chose to move his process onto Taktile. Now, its Case Manager surfaces every risk signal he needs on a customer in a single place, aggregates the full picture with AI, and shows him exactly how it got there. A decision flow he designed himself routes each suspicious transaction into his queue based on rules covering velocity, first-time investors, suspicious logins, structuring patterns for AML, and an internal watchlist he can toggle to closely monitor borderline users. Since every rule is his own, a flag is never a black box: he knows exactly what triggered it and why, all without writing a line of SQL or Python.

By the time an alert lands, the research is already done. Taktile’s AI Case Summary collects the data from every connected system into a single view and proposes a decision; Chris reviews the AI reasoning against his own judgment and makes the final call on every case. It also handles the regulatory side: 314(a) processing runs through the same workflow, alongside direct FinCEN connectivity for SAR filing. And because every alert waits in his queue with full context attached, nothing gets lost; it simply waits, ready for Chris to review. “That's what I really desired: this kind of one-stop shop with the aggregate information, AI doing the initial case review, me reviewing AI's thoughts, and ultimately coming to my own decision,” he shares.

Chris had his rules, watchlists, and workflows up and running in about 8 weeks, all without any engineering build required. Since going live on Taktile, Willow Wealth reviews more activity in less time, with every case still decided by the expert who built its risk function from the ground up. But for Chris, the metric that matters most isn’t on any dashboard: “I feel confident that if volume increases 10x, I'll be okay. Prior to Taktile, I would have been terrified. Now I have the peace of mind that we're ready for that.”

Implementing Taktile cleared the way for Willow Wealth’s upcoming product launches: "Money will stay within our ecosystem and just go from one offering to another, which is what our investors want… It's going to create a much more seamless customer experience as well. We couldn't do that without Taktile," Chris explains. As their new offerings introduce new transaction types and risk signals, Chris can extend Willow Wealth’s rules and AI-driven checks in Taktile — without adding headcount or relying on engineering for every change. The result is one decisioning foundation that can scale with every product Willow Wealth launches next.