Most compliance technology promises to streamline workflows. With Silent Eight, Julia Markiewicz set out to do something harder: replicate the judgement of an experienced investigator. 

As Silent Eight’s Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, she has spent over a decade building the infrastructure now relied on by some of the world’s largest banks. Her career began a long way from banking and now sits at the intersection of financial compliance and AI technology.

From Warsaw to Singapore

Julia grew up in Poland and studied Social Policy at the University of Warsaw, where she learned how institutions and governance shape society. Before fintech, she spent five years running her own recruitment company in Warsaw, where she built teams, managed operations, and made decisions under pressure. These practical leadership lessons carried over directly when she later co-founded Silent Eight.

The pivot came after she moved to Singapore. There, she and her co-founders saw the same problem across global banking, that financial crime was growing in scale and complexity, while the tools used to fight it remained manual and outdated. Compliance teams were drowning in alerts and struggling to separate real threats from noise.

Founding Silent Eight

Silent Eight was founded in 2013 on the premise that AI could replicate the analytical reasoning of a skilled compliance investigator, rather than just automate the tasks around it. The goal was never faster box-ticking, but intelligent systems that could make complex decisions while remaining transparent, explainable, and accountable to regulators.

The Singapore chapter took shape in early 2015, when the company joined the JFDI.Asia accelerator and built Silent Eight Search, an AI platform for navigating large, complex datasets. This was the team’s first public proof that it could apply AI to intricate information problems. Seed funding led by Wavemaker Partners followed that September. Working alongside major banks, Silent Eight built AI that could analyse alerts, investigate cases, and reach consistent decisions aligned to policy.

Inside the Operation

As COO, Julia owns the operational backbone, including global delivery, client success, and the implementation of Silent Eight’s technology across teams in Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Poland. Running that network means working fluently across very different regulatory environments and cultures.

Her core responsibility is measurable results. Banks use Silent Eight to resolve large volumes of alerts with greater speed and accuracy, and the company’s flagship platform, Iris 7, is the product of more than a decade of that work. Built as a policy-bound, Agentic AI system, Iris 7 executes investigative decisions while providing explainable, auditable documentation for every step. In a sector where every automated decision must be governed and accountable to a responsible person, that traceability is essential to the proper function of any AI-enabled compliance solution.

Name screening is a practical illustration. When a customer’s name matches an entry on a sanctions list, a politically-exposed persons (PEP) list, or another watchlist, the alert has to be adjudicated, with the overwhelming majority turning out to be false positives. Silent Eight’s Customer Screening Agent works through those alerts as an analyst would: clearing the false positives, escalating genuine risk, and recording each decision with a plain-English rationale a reviewer can quality-check. In one global bank deployment, it auto-closed roughly two-thirds of alerts, escalated around 70% of true risks, and cut the time to identify a real risk from about 45 days to under seven. The same policy-bound approach now extends across Silent Eight’s core capabilities, spanning customer screening, payment screening, transaction monitoring, and adverse media.

The Milestones That Built Credibility

Trust in this industry is earned slowly, and Silent Eight’s timeline reads as a sequence of proof points. Early recognition came in 2017, when it won the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) FinTech Award at the Singapore FinTech Festival, which served as validation from both the MAS and the Association of Banks in Singapore. The decisive breakthrough followed in July 2018, when Standard Chartered became the first global bank to deploy the platform, initially within its sanctions compliance operations. CEO Bill Winters would later publicly credit its impact on the speed and accuracy of financial crime detection.

From there, the company’s growth compounded, with successive funding rounds, multi-year partnerships with tier-1 banks, and new deployments across Europe and the Middle East, culminating in the 2025 launch of Iris 7. The full timeline, from its Singapore beginnings to today, can be found on Silent Eight’s company history page.

Work That Speaks for Itself

Fintech and banking have long been dominated by men, particularly in leadership. Early on, Julia often had to work harder to establish credibility in rooms full of senior executives. Her response was to let the work speak: delivering technology that changed how banks operated, and shifting conversations from perception to performance. She also stayed direct. Rather than adjusting her voice to fit expectations, she kept it, and found that clarity and honesty earned trust faster than accommodation ever could.

Following the Money

Beyond building a company, Julia is driven by what financial crime actually funds. Illicit flows underwrite human trafficking, organised crime, corruption, and terrorism. Detecting and disrupting them protects legitimate economic activity and makes the world safer.

She sees a second dividend in freeing human talent. Traditional compliance ties up large teams in repetitive investigation. By moving the routine work to AI, skilled analysts can concentrate on the complex, high-stakes cases where human judgement is genuinely irreplaceable.

A Leadership Philosophy

Julia’s approach rests on a few consistent principles:

Transparency: leaders should communicate uncertainty openly rather than hide it, especially in fast-moving fields. 

Speed: waiting for perfect information costs more than acting decisively and learning as you go. 

Partnership: Silent Eight works in close collaboration with financial institutions, regulators, and technical experts, aligned around a shared mission. 

Governance: commercial success and social impact reinforce each other only when the technology is held to high standards. 

Iris 7 reflects this, with every decision it makes being traceable and policy-bound, so banks and regulators can trust the outcome.

The Road Ahead

With the RegTech market surpassing $24B in 2025 and forecast to reach $112.1B by 2033 [1], Julia expects the financial sector to keep transforming under the combined pressure of AI, evolving regulation, and shifting geopolitics. A 2024 Bank of England and FCA survey found that only 34% of firms fully understand the AI they use [2]. Future leaders, she argues, will need adaptability, ethical judgement, and enough technical literacy to understand what AI can and cannot do.

Her own focus is expanding Iris 7’s deployment across more institutions, and extending its capabilities into areas such as fraud prevention as regulatory expectations climb in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Alongside that, she wants Silent Eight to remain a leading voice for responsible, well-governed AI.

Her advice to women entering finance and technology is frank: the industry needs diverse perspectives, the opportunity is real, and waiting for permission is a waste of time. Build the path if the existing routes do not fit. Her own career is proof that innovation tends to arrive when someone is willing to challenge an established system and build something new.