Sardine and Modulr Forge AI Shield for Real-Time Payments

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 29, 2026 – In a significant move to combat the escalating threat of financial crime, AI-powered risk platform Sardine has partnered with payments automation leader Modulr. The collaboration integrates Sardine’s real-time fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) technology directly into Modulr's payment infrastructure, creating a formidable defense against illicit activities in the high-speed world of automated transactions.

The partnership arrives at a critical juncture for the financial industry. As businesses and consumers increasingly demand instant payments, legacy security systems, built for slower, batch-based settlement cycles, are proving dangerously inadequate. This new alliance aims to bridge that security gap, leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to make risk decisions as quickly as the money itself moves.

The New Battleground: Securing Instant Transactions

The global shift towards real-time payments (RTP) has created a fertile ground for sophisticated financial criminals. The speed and irreversibility that make these systems convenient also make them a prime target. According to recent industry analysis, consumers lost over $10 billion to fraud in 2023 alone, a 14% increase from the previous year, with a significant portion attributed to schemes exploiting instant payment rails.

Fraudsters are increasingly using tactics like Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud, where victims are socially engineered into willingly sending money to criminal accounts. Other prevalent methods include account takeovers (ATO), identity theft, and complex layering schemes designed to launder money through multiple accounts in seconds. With Europe’s instant payment volume projected to nearly triple from 7.6 billion transactions in 2023 to 21 billion by 2028, the attack surface is expanding exponentially.

“Real-time payments fundamentally change how fraud and AML needs to be managed,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-Founder of Sardine, in the official announcement. “When funds move instantly, risk decisions need to happen just as quickly.” This sentiment underscores the core challenge: security must operate at the speed of commerce without introducing debilitating friction for legitimate users.

A Strategic Alliance for Trust and Scalability

For Modulr, a platform that automates critical financial operations for over 6,000 businesses and processes over £180 billion in payment value annually, the partnership is a strategic imperative. The company, regulated in the UK and Europe, has built its reputation on providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure for everything from payroll to supplier payments. Integrating Sardine’s capabilities represents a major enhancement to its 'Risk & Compliance Hub,' a suite of tools designed to protect its clients across the entire customer lifecycle.

This move is not just about adding another layer of security; it's about embedding trust directly into the payment flow. In a market where regulatory scrutiny over issues like APP fraud is intensifying, demonstrating a proactive and robust approach to financial crime prevention is a powerful competitive differentiator.

“For Modulr to provide our customers with the ability to run mission-critical finance operations accurately and at scale, we need strong compliance that gives peace of mind without adding friction,” stated Ben Taylor, Chief Operating Officer at Modulr. He emphasized that the partnership with Sardine is a key part of building a compliance hub that keeps pace with business growth, ultimately translating to a streamlined and secure experience for end-users.

The Technology Behind the Shield: Sardine's Agentic AI

What sets Sardine apart in a competitive field of fraud prevention solutions is its "agentic risk platform." This is not a static, rules-based engine but a dynamic, self-learning system powered by AI. It continuously analyzes over 12,000 real-time signals—spanning device intelligence, behavioral biometrics, network data, and transaction patterns—to generate a risk score for every interaction.

The platform's key differentiator is its vast fraud data consortium. By collecting anonymized intelligence from a network covering over 5.5 billion devices and 670 million consumers, Sardine’s AI gains early visibility into emerging fraud typologies. If a new scam surfaces in one corner of its network, the entire system learns to recognize and block it, protecting clients like Modulr before they are even targeted. This shared intelligence model is a powerful countermeasure to the siloed nature of traditional fraud prevention.

Sardine’s technology has already been battle-tested, protecting over $1 trillion in transaction volume across high-risk sectors like crypto and neobanking. This experience provides the platform with unique insights into the most sophisticated attack vectors, which it now brings to bear across Modulr’s extensive payment network.

Redefining the Standard for Financial Crime Prevention

The collaboration between Sardine and Modulr signifies a broader industry shift away from reactive security measures and toward proactive, intelligence-led risk management. By tightly coupling an advanced AI defense system with a high-volume payment infrastructure, the two companies are creating a model for how to build secure, scalable financial services for the digital age.

This integrated approach directly addresses the shortcomings of bolting on security as an afterthought. Instead of treating payments and risk as separate functions, the partnership embeds fraud and AML detection into the very fabric of the transaction process. This ensures that security checks are not a bottleneck but an invisible, seamless part of every payment, protecting businesses and their customers from evolving threats without compromising the speed and efficiency that automated payments promise. As financial crime becomes more organized and technologically advanced, such deeply integrated, AI-driven partnerships may no longer be just a competitive advantage, but a fundamental requirement for survival and growth in the global payments ecosystem.