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Sardine launches AI research lab. Sardine's new AI Labs aims to reduce retail fraud and payment risks through advanced behavioral intelligence and real-time threat detection. Curated by Financing Your Way from original reporting by Finextra - Lending. Summary is AI-assisted and editorially reviewed - see its editorial standards. Fighting fraud just got more sophisticated with the launch of Sardine AI Labs. This new research initiative focuses on 'agentic risk' platforms. For retailers, this means more accurate fraud detection that works in real-time. The technology aims to stop payment fraud and account takeovers before they impact your bottom line. As more consumers use digital financing and BNPL options, the risk of sophisticated identity theft increases. Sardine is developing AI that can think like a fraudster to stay one step ahead. For your business, this translates to higher approval rates for legitimate customers and fewer costly chargebacks. The goal of this research is to move beyond simple rule-based security. Instead, these AI models look at behavioral patterns to catch complex scams that traditional systems might miss. Integrating advanced fraud detection allows you to offer seamless financing at checkout without the friction of manual reviews. This technology is particularly relevant for high-ticket items where a single fraudulent transaction can wipe out the margins of several sales. As financial crimes become more automated, having an automated defense becomes a necessity for modern operators. Who else is covering this

Introducing Sardine Flow: Connect data, APIs, and Agents to automate workflows without code. Sep 11, 2026 In this page Fraud and compliance decisions rarely come down to a single rule or API call. Onboarding a customer, investigating an alert, or resolving a dispute can require multiple data providers, internal rules, AI agents, case management systems, and human reviewers. Most teams connect those steps with custom code, scheduled jobs, and one-off integrations that are difficult to monitor and maintain. Today, Sardine is introducing Sardine Flow, a visual workflow orchestration platform for building, running, and monitoring fraud and compliance processes across Sardine products, third-party data, rules, AI agents, and human review. Flow turns the individual steps behind a risk decision into a connected workflow, so teams do not have to choose between deterministic automation and AI. They can use predictable workflow steps where the process is known, AI agents where investigation or judgment is required, and human review where people need to make the final call. The result is less custom code, greater visibility into how decisions are made, and a faster way to build and improve risk operations. Why Sardine built flow. When Sardine work with fraud and compliance teams, one of the first questions Sardine ask is whether there is a documented SOP for the process. If the answer is yes, much of that work can usually run deterministically. The steps are known, the conditions are defined, and the process can execute consistently without requiring an AI agent for work that is already well understood. But many risk processes are not that clean. They involve ambiguity, investigation, unstructured information, or judgment that can't be fully captured in a predefined workflow. That's where an AI agent is the better fit. In practice, most fraud and compliance operations require both. A single process might combine deterministic checks, AI investigation, external data, and human judgment. And that mix can change over time. A team might start with an agent when the process is poorly defined, then move the stable, repeatable parts into deterministic workflow steps as patterns emerge. That's why Sardine built Sardine Flow: to give teams one place to combine deterministic workflows and AI agents, using each where it makes sense, rather than forcing every risk process into one model of automation. The problem with glue code. Fraud and compliance workflows are rarely simple, and no two businesses run them exactly the same way. The data providers, internal policies, approval steps, and actions involved depend on each company's products, customers, risk appetite, and regulatory requirements. Even a common process like customer onboarding might require a unique combination of identity checks, device intelligence, internal data, risk rules, AI analysis, and human review. Connecting all of those steps usually requires custom code. Teams build individual integrations, scripts, scheduled jobs, and decision logic for each process. As the business changes, that code becomes harder to maintain, monitor, and update. Adding a new vendor or changing a review step can turn into another engineering project. It's a process, usually built once, patched repeatedly, and rarely observable end to end. When something breaks, you're debugging glue code instead of your actual risk strategy. How Sardine Flow works. Sardine Flow gives teams a visual, drag-and-drop builder for assembling the steps behind a fraud or compliance process. A workflow can: * Start from an API request, event, or scheduled task * Call Sardine products and third-party data providers * Apply rules and conditional logic * Invoke an AI agent to investigate or interpret information * Route a case to a human reviewer * Trigger actions in downstream systems * Record each step and its outcome Flow then runs the process consistently and provides visibility into what happened at every step. As Flow has moved into production, Sardine has added more control and visibility for teams operating workflows day to day. Teams can control which nodes are available to different users, see performance and execution stats for each flow, and manage workflows through a more structured interface built for production use. Two things make this different from a one-off script: * Consistent execution. Each workflow defines what information it receives, how each step runs, and what it returns. That makes the process easier to test, monitor, and update than custom glue code. * Support for different timelines. Flow can support low-latency decisions as well as processes that pause while waiting for a vendor response, scheduled event, AI investigation, or human decision. That flexibility matters because risk and compliance work isn't uniformly the same speed. An onboarding or KYC workflow may include automated checks, vendor responses, AI investigation, and human review, with some steps completing immediately and others taking longer. Flow is designed to orchestrate both. Built for real-time and long-running work alike. Because Flow supports different triggers, steps, and timelines, teams can use it across a wide range of fraud and compliance processes: * Customer onboarding and KYC/KYB * Transaction monitoring and risk scoring * Dispute management * Enhanced due diligence * Manual review * Periodic customer reviews * AI-led investigations For example, one neobank customer uses Flow in production to automate its false-positive allowlisting process. Every 15 minutes, the workflow retrieves alerts analysts have cleared as false positives, runs additional checks, and adds customers that meet the required conditions to a custom allowlist. Instead of having an analyst repeat that process manually, Flow runs it consistently and records what happened. Customers are also applying Flow to recurring due diligence reviews and dispute processes that previously required teams to move between multiple systems manually. Rules, AI agents, and people working together. Sardine don't think the future of risk decisioning is rules versus AI. The approach that actually works combines both, plus people, depending on what a given decision needs: * Rules enforce policies, thresholds, and decision logic that must remain consistent * AI agents investigate cases, analyze documents & other unstructured information, and summarize findings * People resolve exceptions and make decisions that require accountability or judgment Flow brings all three into the same process. Every rule result, agent action, and human decision appears as part of one workflow, giving teams a complete view of how an outcome was reached. A useful way to decide where each belongs is to ask how clearly the work can be defined. If a team has a documented, repeatable process, it can usually be represented as a workflow. If the work involves ambiguity, investigation, or unstructured information, an AI agent may be the better fit. The two can also evolve together. A team may initially use an agent to investigate a poorly documented process. As consistent patterns emerge, the predictable parts can be converted into lower-cost workflow steps, while the agent continues handling exceptions and judgment-intensive work. From risk products to a risk operations platform. Every risk process is different, but the underlying building blocks are often the same: data, rules, decisions, reviews, and actions. Sardine Flow makes those building blocks reusable. Teams can connect Sardine capabilities with their own policies, external providers, AI agents, and operational processes without building a new integration for every use case. That gives fraud and compliance teams one place to configure how work gets done, monitor each execution, and improve processes as their risks and policies change. If your team is stitching together vendors, rules, agents, and review steps by hand, contact Sardine to see how Sardine Flow can simplify the infrastructure behind your risk operations.