Sardine and Helix by Q2 Join Forces to Deliver Real-Time Fraud Monitoring and Advanced Compliance Capabilities for Sponsor Banks and Fintechs
As real-time payments, embedded finance, and digital banking continue to reshape the global financial services landscape, the need for intelligent, scalable, and real-time risk management has never been more urgent. Addressing this growing challenge, Sardine, a leading agentic risk management platform focused on combating financial crime, has announced a strategic partnership with Helix by Q2 (NYSE: QTWO), an award-winning, cloud-native core banking platform purpose-built for embedded finance.
Through this collaboration, Sardine will integrate its advanced fraud detection, transaction monitoring, and Bank Secrecy Act / Anti-Money Laundering (BSA/AML) compliance tools directly into Helix’s API-first infrastructure. The partnership is designed to help sponsor banks and fintech companies strengthen their risk management frameworks while maintaining the speed, flexibility, and customer experience demanded by today’s always-on financial ecosystem.
By combining Helix’s modern core banking architecture with Sardine’s real-time, agentic risk intelligence, the two companies aim to deliver a comprehensive, end-to-end solution that addresses fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and transaction risk management across every stage of the financial lifecycle.
The Growing Complexity of Fraud and Compliance in Embedded Finance
The rapid expansion of embedded finance has transformed how consumers and businesses interact with financial services. Fintech companies now embed banking, payments, lending, and money movement capabilities directly into non-financial platforms—from e-commerce and payroll systems to marketplaces and vertical SaaS solutions.
While this innovation has unlocked tremendous growth opportunities, it has also introduced significant risk. Real-time payments, instant account funding, and API-driven integrations have compressed decision-making windows, leaving little margin for error when identifying fraud or ensuring regulatory compliance.
Sponsor banks, in particular, face heightened scrutiny from regulators as they support fintech partners operating at scale. Traditional, rules-based compliance systems and manual review processes are no longer sufficient to keep pace with the velocity and complexity of modern money movement.
It is within this context that the partnership between Sardine and Helix emerges as a timely and strategic response to an industry-wide challenge.
A Deep Integration Designed for Real-Time Risk Decisions
At the core of the partnership is a deep, native integration between Sardine’s risk management platform and Helix’s cloud-native core. Sardine will connect directly to Helix’s API-first architecture, enabling continuous, real-time monitoring of transactions as they move across the financial system.
This integration allows banks and fintechs using Helix to deploy a unified fraud and compliance layer that spans:
- Customer onboarding and identity risk
- Ongoing transaction monitoring
- Payment rail–specific fraud detection
- Automated BSA/AML workflows
- Real-time interdiction of suspicious activity
Rather than relying on fragmented tools or post-transaction reviews, Helix clients will be able to assess risk before funds move, across multiple payment types and channels.
The result is a holistic, end-to-end risk management framework that improves detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and minimizes operational friction for both compliance teams and end users.
Monitoring Across Every Payment Rail
One of the defining advantages of the Sardine–Helix integration is its ability to monitor transactions across all major payment rails within a single, intelligent platform.
This includes:
- ACH transactions
- Real-Time Payments (RTP)
- Card-based transactions
- Ledger-level activity
- Internal transfers and account movements
By aggregating signals across these rails, Sardine’s platform can detect anomalies that may not be visible when systems operate in isolation. This cross-rail visibility is especially critical in identifying sophisticated fraud patterns, such as account takeovers, synthetic identity fraud, and money laundering schemes that exploit multiple transaction types.
Sardine’s agentic technology continuously adapts to emerging threats, learning from behavioral patterns and evolving risk signals to provide more accurate and timely decisions.
Automating Compliance While Reducing Operational Burden
Beyond fraud detection, the partnership places a strong emphasis on streamlining compliance operations—a persistent pain point for banks and fintechs alike.
Through Sardine’s infrastructure, Helix clients can automate key BSA/AML processes, including:
- Suspicious activity detection
- Risk-based alerts and case creation
- Automated workflows for investigations
- Audit-ready reporting and documentation
This automation significantly reduces the amount of manual review required by compliance teams, lowering operational costs while improving consistency and accuracy. At the same time, configurable workflows allow institutions to tailor risk thresholds and policies to their specific regulatory and business requirements.
For fintechs operating under sponsor bank oversight, this level of transparency and configurability helps align incentives and expectations across all parties involved.
Enabling Speed Without Sacrificing Safety
A central theme of the Sardine–Helix partnership is the ability to support innovation without compromising safety or compliance.
“Modern money movement happens in real time, and risk decisions have to keep pace,” said Ravi Loganathan, Head of Banking & Policy at Sardine. “Our integration with Helix gives sponsor banks a single intelligent layer to assess risk across every rail, including ACH, RTP, cards, and ledger transactions, before funds move. Together, we are enabling banks and fintechs to grow safely, remain compliant, and operate at the speed their customers expect.”
This philosophy reflects a broader shift in the industry toward proactive, intelligence-driven risk management rather than reactive controls that slow down growth.
By embedding risk decisions directly into the transaction flow, the combined solution allows financial institutions to deliver seamless customer experiences while maintaining robust safeguards against fraud and financial crime.
Unlocking Innovation for Banks and Fintechs
From Helix’s perspective, the partnership represents a meaningful enhancement to its Banking-as-a-Service and embedded finance offering.
“Fraud prevention has long been a bottleneck for innovation in financial services,” said Ahon Sarkar, General Manager of Helix by Q2. “By partnering with Sardine, we’re giving our clients a best-in-class way to manage risk and compliance without sacrificing speed, efficiency, or customer experience. It’s a true example of how a modern core and modern fraud technology combine to deliver exponential value.”
Helix’s cloud-native core is designed to give fintechs and financial institutions the building blocks of banking—accounts, payments, cards, and compliance—through flexible APIs. By integrating Sardine’s real-time risk capabilities, Helix strengthens its value proposition as a platform that enables innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards.
Early Adoption and Industry Validation
The benefits of the integration are already resonating with forward-thinking financial institutions.
First Federal Bank of Kansas City, a sponsor bank with a strong fintech strategy, highlighted the partnership as a key enabler of its growth vision.
“First Federal Bank of Kansas City is deeply committed to its fintech strategy, and the integration between Helix and Sardine is a strategic enabler of that vision,” said Josh Hofer, Vice President of Fintech at First Federal Bank of Kansas City. “The combination of Helix’s embedded finance infrastructure with Sardine’s advanced risk and fraud capabilities will help us deliver a safer and more scalable experience for our fintech partners.”
For sponsor banks like First Federal, the ability to support fintech innovation while maintaining rigorous oversight is essential. The Sardine–Helix solution offers a way to scale programs confidently, even as transaction volumes and complexity increase.
Helix by Q2: Powering Embedded Finance at Scale
Helix by Q2 is widely recognized as one of the leading cloud-native cores purpose-built for embedded finance. Designed from the ground up to support API-driven integrations, Helix enables fintech companies, brands, and financial institutions to embed banking capabilities directly into their products.
The platform currently supports:
- Over 18 million accounts
- Approximately $40 billion in transaction volume
Helix’s modular architecture allows clients to launch and scale financial products quickly, whether they are building digital wallets, payments solutions, or fully embedded banking experiences.
By partnering with Sardine, Helix further strengthens its ability to support clients operating in highly regulated environments, where compliance, fraud prevention, and risk management are as critical as speed to market.
Sardine: A New Standard for Agentic Risk Management
Sardine has emerged as a leader in the fight against financial crime by rethinking how risk management works in a real-time world. Its agentic platform combines advanced analytics, behavioral intelligence, and automation to detect fraud and streamline compliance operations across the financial ecosystem.
Today, Sardine is trusted by:
- More than 300 financial institutions and enterprises
- Organizations protecting over $1 trillion in transaction volume
- Platforms serving 503 million consumers and 2.6 million businesses
By focusing on real-time decisioning and end-to-end visibility, Sardine helps organizations move beyond legacy systems that were designed for a slower, less interconnected financial environment.
Addressing Regulatory Expectations in a Changing Landscape
Regulatory scrutiny of sponsor bank and fintech relationships continues to intensify, particularly in areas related to AML, fraud controls, and third-party risk management. Regulators increasingly expect banks to demonstrate real-time oversight and strong governance across their fintech partnerships.
The Sardine–Helix integration directly addresses these expectations by providing:
- Centralized visibility into transaction risk
- Configurable compliance controls aligned with regulatory requirements
- Automated documentation and reporting for audits and examinations
By embedding these capabilities into the core banking infrastructure, institutions can move from reactive compliance to proactive risk management—an approach that aligns with evolving regulatory guidance.
About Sardine
Sardine is the leading agentic risk management platform designed to protect companies from financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to detect fraud in real-time and streamline compliance operations. Companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Deel, Checkout, and Brex rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products. Learn more at sardine.ai.
About Helix by Q2
Helix’s award-winning Banking-as-a-Service platform gives innovative fintechs and brands the building blocks of banking—accounts, cards, payments, data and controls, admin tools, and monetization solutions—to make it easy to embed personalized financial experiences that integrate and scale. For more information on Helix, visit helix.q2.com. Follow us on LinkedIn and X to stay up to date.
About First Federal Bank of Kansas City
Since 1934, First Federal Bank of Kansas City has pursued its mission of helping people “build a better financial future” by developing lasting customer relationships and through a genuine commitment to supporting the communities it serves. As a mutual bank, community growth is company success. First Federal Bank provides consumer banking products and services, mortgage and construction lending, and a full range of business banking and treasury management solutions, serving more than 25,000 customers across 10 locations in the Kansas City metro area and thousands of mortgage customers nationwide.
Member FDIC. Equal Housing Lender.
www.ffbkc.com
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