Stearns Bank teams up with Sardine to enhance FinTech compliance

By Delisha Fernandes

Stearns Ban has partnered with Sardine, a risk management and compliance solutions provider, to enhance Stearns Bank’s FinTech program.

This collaboration marks a first-of-its-kind approach in community banking to provide an all-in-one risk management and compliance platform for sponsored programs to address evolving regulatory and compliance requirements.

As the demand for faster money movement increases, the risk of fraud increases. Stearns Bank and Sardine recognise the need for enhanced compliance and multi-layered fraud detection and prevention tools to safeguard faster payment offerings.

Sardine utilises cutting-edge technology to consolidate critical compliance data and integrated risk scoring. It offers banks a solution to tackle modern fraud with real-time fraud detection, KYC, KYB, BSA/AML, and transaction monitoring.

With Sardine in place, Stearns Bank has real-time oversight into their KYC/AML policies, fraud, and AML transaction monitoring alerts across all their sponsored programs in one integrated dashboard. Stearns Bank can work directly with their FinTech partners to easily create new fraud detection, KYC policy, or transaction monitoring rules via Sardine’s no-code rule editor.

“As regulations continue to evolve and scrutiny into the FinTech space intensifies, which it should, Stearns Bank continues to prioritise risk management and compliance in its FinTech partnerships and sponsorship offerings,” said Kelly Skalicky, President and CEO of Stearns Bank. “We continue to assess and select our FinTech partners based on our exacting Stearns Bank ‘Risk-Management 1^st‘ standards, selecting compliance-focused partners like Sardine committed to an elevated and always-maturing risk management model for deploying FinTech-facilitated banking services.”

“We are excited to work with a tech-savvy partner such as Stearns Bank to enhance their FinTech offerings and showcase an innovative way to do program management of FinTechs and embedded finance,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine. “Our unique platform enables enhanced monitoring of regulatory, reputation, and operational risk for sponsor banks through real-time views into aggregated fraud and compliance performance, as well as tools to manage and mitigate those risks.”