National Bank of Canada has entered a multi-year partnership with Sardine to deploy device intelligence and real-time risk scoring across its operations.
The Canada-based bank, which serves approximately 2.7 million clients globally, will implement Sardine's device intelligence and real-time risk scoring capabilities as part of its financial crime prevention operations. The decision followed an evaluation period during which Sardine's platform was assessed for fraud detection performance and its impact on false positive rates, a key metric for banks seeking to reduce unnecessary friction in the customer experience.
Investment alongside the commercial agreement
According to the official press release, the partnership is accompanied by a financial commitment: National Bank of Canada is leading a USD 25 million Series C extension round in Sardine, bringing the company's total funding to USD 170 million. The investment is being made through NAventures, the bank's corporate venture capital arm.
The dual nature of the agreement, represented by the process of combining a commercial deployment with a funding round, reflects a broader pattern in financial services, where institutions increasingly take equity stakes in technology providers alongside operational partnerships.
Platform capabilities and deployment scope
Sardine's platform is positioned around agentic risk management, combining device intelligence with automated risk scoring to identify fraud signals in real time. Under the terms of the agreement, the technology will be applied across multiple business lines at National Bank of Canada, covering retail banking, commercial clients, and wealth management.
In addition, real-time risk scoring at this scale requires infrastructure capable of processing behavioural and device-level signals at the point of transaction, rather than relying solely on post-transaction review. Reducing false positives is a stated objective: high rates of incorrectly flagged transactions create friction for customers and operational costs for fraud teams.
Context: financial institutions and fraud technology
Financial crime prevention has become a growing area of technology investment for banks, driven by the rise of account takeover fraud, authorised push payment scams, and increasingly sophisticated social engineering. Regulatory expectations around fraud controls have also intensified in several jurisdictions, adding compliance dimensions to what were previously purely operational decisions.
Sardine has positioned itself within this environment by targeting financial institutions looking to replace or augment legacy fraud tooling with platforms that incorporate device intelligence and machine learning-based scoring. The National Bank of Canada agreement is presented by the company as part of a broader expansion in the financial services segment.
