Bunq is Europe’s second-largest neobank, providing its users with a flexible way to spend in 30+ currencies without opening separate accounts. Users can manage sub accounts and shared expenses, and even automate financial workflows across other tools. Onboarding takes less than five minutes, which has helped bunq attract its over 20 million users.

As the fraud landscape continues to evolve, so have the complexity and turnover rate of the threats. Stephanie Rios, bunq’s Product Owner for Fraud Prevention, recognized quickly that to keep up with modern scams, bunq had to stay one step ahead of the fraudsters, and that required cutting-edge tooling.

Sardine stood out as an end-to-end solution

Stephanie started with a clear vision for her team: “We’re here to protect our users.” To meet that goal, she decided to look for a solution that could help bunq fortify its fraud responses. 

She evaluated three major vendors: Lucinity, Noto, and Sardine. After a few meetings, Sardine quickly stood out as the top choice. “Meetings with Sardine were concise and effective, proving to be a good fit for bunq’s culture,” said Stephanie. “With Sardine, we would explain a problem, and they would outline how to use their solution to fix it,” said Stephanie. 

bunq had a long list of hard and soft requirements, including behavioral analytics, phone risk scoring, a no-code rule builder, backtesting, machine learning, and case management. After some evaluation, Sardine’s end-to-end solution stood out as the winner to solve both fraud prevention and AML. Stephanie liked that it gave her team the autonomy to identify a threat, create and test a rule, then deploy it without relying on engineering.

“Our team had a list of hard requirements across fraud and AML, and Sardine met them all. We chose Sardine because they offered a complete solution that aligned with how we needed to work.”

Sardine exceeds bunq’s expectations on all major risk metrics 

bunq’s engineering team was able to set up Sardine’s SDK relatively quickly, freeing them up to focus on other priorities. The fraud team saw a “massive” reduction of risk after implementing Sardine across their customer lifecycle, as well as a nice lift in accuracy.

With the support of Sardine’s fraud & AML platform, bunq has:

• 82% lower fraudulent incoming funds compared to similar neobanks
• 95% fewer fraud victims compared to industry benchmarks
• 4X reduction in false positives

bunq stops criminals in the act with Sardine

bunq’s fraud analysis team can now swiftly identify, respond, and proactively block threats themselves without relying on engineering teams to write hard-coded rules. The speed and efficiency of the process was demonstrated during a particular incident last year. “It was ten at night, and we discovered a fraud ring attack,” said Stephanie. The team opened up a laptop on a table and launched Sardine’s dashboard. Within minutes, they identified what the fraudsters were doing and deployed a rule to stop the attack in progress. 

“Sardine’s platform helped us instantly detect the threat, trace the scam across accounts and devices, and shut it down on the spot. We went from alert to resolution in under 20 minutes.”

An optimistic future for bunq

The bunq team will continually innovate with Sardine to protect the integrity of their platform. The team already is benefitting from Sardine’s risk platform, and are considering AI transaction filtering using their own data as well. Stephanie emphasized how much freedom her team has gained from Sardine, enabling them to be even more proactive and adapt to threats in real-time.