How Prezzee increased approval rates by up to 70% and unlocked global growth
Prezzee is a digital gifting platform that helps consumers, businesses, and large enterprises deliver personalized gifting experiences at the moments that matter most, from birthdays to employee recognition. Founded in Australia 12 years ago, Prezzee now operates across seven countries with plans to continue scaling internationally.
The challenge: Approval rates that constrained growth
Global expansion brought a new level of risk. Like many high-growth startups, Prezzee initially chose a managed fraud service to reduce operational burden and move quickly. While the service kept fraud losses low, it came with a significant catch: the tradeoff for a low-touch system was far too rigid and lacked the nuance needed to accurately distinguish a criminal from a legitimate customer.
This lack of nuance was compounded by an absence of visibility. The tooling operated as a black box, offering no granular data on why transactions were being declined or how rules were performing across different regions. This created a ceiling for growth that was difficult to diagnose.
The expansion into the U.S. and the U.K. was a significant turning point. What worked in Australia failed to translate to new regions, where local payment behaviours resulted in higher decline rates due to false-positives. This was not the customer experience that Prezzee needed when launching new businesses and wanting to wow customers with their market-leading platform.
It became clear that Prezzee needed a different approach. They required a system that could reduce false positives without increasing fraud risk, providing the granular data needed to support long-term global growth and provide a deeper understanding of their customers.
Why Prezzee chose Sardine to improve approvals without increasing fraud
During vendor evaluation, Sardine stood out for three reasons.
First, the approach was modern and data-driven. Sardine combined deep fraud expertise with a platform built around data science and adaptive models, designed to evolve alongside new attack vectors and emerging threats.
Second, the platform offered a strong starting point out of the box. Prezzee could move quickly without months of heavy lifting, while still retaining the flexibility to customize rules, models, and workflows as their needs changed.
Third, the partnership mattered. Prezzee viewed Sardine not as a vendor, but as a team working alongside them. From implementation through ongoing optimization, Sardine’s team integrated with Prezzee’s team, helping develop internal capabilities and sharpen fraud strategy over time.
The solution: Real-time visibility and model-driven decisioning across markets
A key differentiator for Prezzee was Sardine’s management platform.
“One of the key things is being able to leverage the sheer volume of network data that Sardine has across all their customers in a very anonymized way...we get those true industry insights from a much greater pool than what we have available in our own systems, however we can also add our internal data to drive far richer decisions.”
The platform delivered real-time insights, analytics, and fast rule customization, all backed by a model-driven decisioning framework. For the first time, the team could see how signals behaved across markets, understand customer personas at a granular level, and detect anomalies in real-time as patterns shifted.
This visibility was driven by the depth of the data available. A broad range of signals including device intelligence, behavioral telemetry, and user characteristics enabled Prezzee to tailor fraud strategies to specific regions and use cases, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all rules.
By leveraging these network-level insights, Prezzee gained a proactive edge. Access to anonymized, industry-wide trends allowed the team to anticipate emerging threats and fraud tactics before they ever hit their own ecosystem.
The results: 70% approval rate improvements across new markets
Since implementing Sardine, Prezzee has seen significant improvements across both business performance and internal operations.
“In our newer markets, we're seeing up to 70% improvement in approvals. That's a significant number of customers who would have come to Prezzee for the first time and potentially been disappointed, however are now working through our platform quite successfully. The lifetime value of those customers is immeasurable.”
Importantly, those gains did not come at the expense of higher fraud. Prezzee maintained a card fraud rate less than half the industry average and well within internal benchmarks, demonstrating that higher approvals and strong risk controls can scale together.
Operationally, the fraud function evolved as well. The team shifted away from reactive decisioning and toward understanding customer behavior and supporting expansion. What was once viewed as a cost center became a contributor to revenue growth.
Building a fraud function that supports revenue, not just risk
Adopting Sardine required investment in people as well as technology.
Prezzee built a small, high-performing team of data scientists and analysts focused on monitoring trends, analyzing signals, and applying insights across the business. That capability now supports new product launches, regional expansion, and even customer conversations.
The fraud program became a source of differentiation, not just risk mitigation. Prezzee now engages directly with its customers’ fraud and operations teams, sharing insights and helping them think through evolving fraud and security challenges.
A partnership focused on continuous improvement and measurable outcomes
One of the biggest surprises for Prezzee was the level of ongoing investment Sardine makes in its platform.
We felt that the people that we were working with were actually in the tent with us,” said Flanagan. “They were in the trenches with us combating this and developing our people, our capabilities, and our insights around how we were going to prevent fraud.”
New features, continuous improvement, and a highly responsive product team reinforced the sense of partnership. Feedback flowed both ways, influencing how the platform evolved and how the two teams worked together.
For Prezzee, that alignment mattered. Long-term growth depends on partners who share outcomes, values, and a commitment to getting better over time.
What’s next: Extending Sardine across the full security ecosystem
Prezzee initially deployed Sardine to support payments approvals and transaction success. Looking ahead, the company plans to embed Sardine more deeply across the entire user journey.
By integrating Sardine’s insights with other security tools, Prezzee aims to strengthen its end-to-end security ecosystem and improve its ability to prevent and respond to emerging threats.
Takeaway: Approval rates, data ownership, and the right partner matter
For companies navigating global expansion and evolving fraud risks, Prezzee’s advice is simple: embrace the data.
Managed solutions can reduce short-term complexity, but long-term success requires visibility, control, and internal expertise. That journey is only possible with the right partner, one that shares your goals and is invested in your outcomes. With approval rates rising as high as 70% in newer markets and fraud remaining its lowest yet, Prezzee proved that global growth doesn’t require trading off security for scale.
“In a rapidly evolving space, you really need to be on top of things and invest in building those skills internally. But you can also only do that if you've got the right partner. In our case, we felt like Sardine was the right one for us and the proof is in our results.”