Sardine

Sardine is an AI-powered fraud prevention platform built for financial services companies, fintech startups, crypto exchanges, and any business that processes digital payments at scale. The company focuses specifically on the problem of real-time payment fraud, using a combination of device intelligence and behavioral signals to flag suspicious activity before a transaction clears. It sits in the infrastructure layer, meaning it is typically integrated by engineering and risk teams rather than used directly by end consumers.

How Sardine works

Sardine analyzes each transaction by pulling together signals from two sources: the device and the user’s behavior during the session. On the device side, it builds a fingerprint that identifies the hardware and software environment, making it harder for fraudsters to spoof identity by switching accounts or clearing cookies. On the behavior side, it watches how a user moves through a session, things like typing rhythm, mouse movement, and interaction patterns, to establish whether the person behind the keyboard matches expected behavior for that account.

These signals feed into a real-time risk score that is returned at the moment of a transaction decision. Alongside fraud prevention, Sardine includes AML (anti-money laundering) transaction monitoring, which screens payments against compliance rules and flags activity that may require regulatory reporting. When the system flags a case, it routes it to a built-in case management interface where risk analysts can review, escalate, or clear it.

• Real-Time Risk Scoring – each transaction is scored instantly so decisions do not add noticeable latency to the payment flow.
• Device Fingerprinting – persistent device identification across sessions and accounts to detect repeat bad actors.
• Behavior Biometrics – passive analysis of how a user interacts with a session, without requiring additional friction for legitimate users.
• AML Transaction Monitoring – built-in compliance screening for suspicious transaction patterns.
• Case Management – a workflow tool for fraud and compliance analysts to review flagged events.

Strengths

Sardine combines fraud prevention and AML compliance into a single platform, which reduces the number of separate vendors a risk team needs to manage. The behavior biometrics layer is a meaningful differentiator: passive behavioral analysis can catch account takeovers and synthetic identity fraud that device checks alone miss. Having case management built in rather than bolted on also means analysts work in one system instead of exporting data to spreadsheets or a separate ticketing tool.

The real-time architecture is important for payment use cases where a delayed risk decision is not practical. Scoring at transaction time, rather than in a batch review after the fact, means high-risk payments can be blocked or stepped up before money moves.

Limitations

Sardine does not publish pricing, which makes it difficult for smaller companies or early-stage fintechs to evaluate whether the platform fits their budget without going through a sales process first. Platforms in this category typically price on transaction volume or API call volume, so costs can scale significantly as a business grows.

Sardine is built for businesses that have engineering resources to integrate an API-based fraud tool. There is no self-serve consumer product; teams without dedicated risk engineering or compliance staff will face a steeper onboarding curve. Companies that only need basic payment fraud tooling without the AML layer may also find the platform broader than their immediate needs.

Who it is for

Sardine is best suited for fintechs, crypto platforms, neobanks, and payment processors that operate at meaningful transaction volume and need to meet both fraud and AML compliance requirements. It is particularly relevant for companies in regulated industries where transaction monitoring is a legal obligation, not just a business preference. Risk and compliance teams at growth-stage and enterprise companies are the primary users. It is not aimed at individual consumers or small businesses processing a handful of transactions per day.

How it compares

Sardine sits in the business-to-business fraud infrastructure space, which puts it in a different category from consumer-facing financial tools. If you are an individual looking to monitor your own financial health or credit standing, a tool like Credit Karma is a more relevant starting point, as it provides personal credit monitoring and financial product recommendations rather than enterprise fraud APIs.

For users in the crypto space evaluating where Sardine might intersect with consumer platforms they already use, Coinbase operates its own internal fraud and compliance infrastructure for its retail exchange. Sardine, by contrast, is the type of tool that a crypto exchange or payment processor would integrate to build that kind of capability themselves. The two are not direct competitors; one is a consumer exchange and the other is infrastructure for businesses building financial products.

Within the enterprise fraud detection category, buyers typically evaluate Sardine against other API-first fraud platforms. The combination of device intelligence, behavior biometrics, and AML in one product is Sardine’s main argument for consolidation over assembling multiple point solutions.