Linker Finance and Sardine have entered into a strategic partnership aimed at strengthening fraud prevention capabilities for smaller financial institutions.
The collaboration will see Linker Finance integrate Sardine’s advanced real-time fraud detection tools across its retail and business banking services.
The partnership seeks to address a persistent challenge faced by community banks: maintaining robust fraud prevention and risk management systems while operating with fewer technological resources than larger national institutions. By embedding Sardine’s risk intelligence within Linker’s platform, the companies aim to enhance early threat detection, reduce operational burdens on banking teams and improve protection for depositors.
As part of the integration, Linker Finance will incorporate Sardine’s device, behavioural and transaction-based risk signals into key banking workflows. These include deposit account opening, account funding, payment processes and authentication checks. The joint approach is designed to surface suspicious activity earlier, helping banks detect potential threats before they escalate into financial losses.
Linker Finance provides modular infrastructure that enables community banks to modernise their retail and commercial banking services. Its platform supports account opening, payment processing and operational workflows, helping smaller banks deploy digital capabilities without the complexity of large-scale technology overhauls. By orchestrating customer data and risk controls within a unified environment, Linker enables institutions to streamline compliance processes and deliver more responsive banking services.
Sardine, meanwhile, focuses on protecting financial institutions and technology companies from fraud and financial crime through its risk management platform. The company’s system combines behavioural analysis, device intelligence and transaction monitoring to identify high-risk activity in real time. Through application programming interfaces (APIs) and automated decisioning capabilities, Sardine enables organisations to embed risk assessment directly into their digital operations.
The collaboration between the two firms focuses particularly on high-risk banking flows. These include deposit account opening and funding, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) verification processes, anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring, as well as ACH and wire transactions. By combining Sardine’s infrastructure-level signals with Linker’s customer intelligence and orchestration capabilities, banks gain more comprehensive insight into potential fraud risks.
The integration also introduces a series of operational improvements designed to streamline risk management for banks. These include real-time risk scoring during account opening and funding, behavioural and device signals that help prevent account takeover attempts, and integrated AML monitoring with sanctions screening embedded directly into operational workflows. In addition, automated risk prioritisation and decisioning aim to reduce the volume of manual reviews handled by banking teams, allowing staff to focus on customer relationships while maintaining strong oversight of suspicious activity.
Sardine GM of Banking Ravi Loganathan said, “Community banks remain the backbone of local economies, but are often lacking the sophisticated anti-fraud and risk management technologies of major national banks. By integrating Sardine with Linker’s retail and business banking workflows, we’re giving community institutions enterprise grade protection that will protect their customers and communities with confidence.”
Linker Finance CEO and Co-Founder Jorge Garcia said, “Combining Linker’s retail and business banking capabilities with Sardine’s advanced risk signals transforms how community banks combat payment and account fraud. By applying Sardine’s real-time scoring to check processing, ACH and wire transactions alongside AML monitoring, banks gain faster threat detection and automated response options, which reduces manual review workload for bankers, lets teams prioritize customer relationships and strengthens protection for depositors.”
Linker Finance EVP, CIO Pete Torres said, “As a technology organization, we focus on integrations that are fast, reliable and measurable. Sardine’s low-latency APIs and robust device and behavioral signals let us automate risk decisions in real time across retail and commercial flows, improve customer conversion during funding, and significantly reduce manual workload for operations.”
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