Stearns Bank & Sardine is transforming fintech compliance with a new risk management operating system

Stearns Bank NA has partnered with Sardine, a leading provider of risk management and compliance solutions, 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 meet evolving regulatory and compliance requirements.

As the demand for faster money movement increases, so does the risk of fraud. Stearns Bank and Sardine recognize the need for improved compliance and multi-layered fraud detection and prevention tools to ensure faster payment offerings.

Sardine’s all-in-one risk management and compliance platform helps sponsor banks manage fintech regulatory risks without the need for multiple service providers. Using cutting-edge technology to consolidate critical compliance data and integrated risk scoring, Sardine offers banks a way to tackle modern fraud with real-time fraud detection, KYC, KYB, BSA/AML and transaction monitoring in one solution.

“Sardine breaks down data silos and enables our teams to effectively identify issues for remediation and quickly collect and share relevant data for further audit, investigation and regulatory purposes as needed,” said Josh Hofer, Chief Risk & Information Security Officer at Stearns Bank. “This allows us to keep pace with fintech innovation and scale our fintech offerings while improving risk management and streamlining compliance – what we offer with Sardine is transformative for fintechs, community banks and fintech sponsorships.”

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

“As regulation continues to evolve and scrutiny of the fintech space intensifies, as it should, Stearns Bank continues to prioritize risk management and compliance in its fintech partnerships and sponsorship offerings,” said Kelly Skalicky, president and CEO of Stearns Bank. “We continue to evaluate and select our fintech partners based on our rigorous Stearns Bank ‘Risk-Management 1st’ standards, choosing compliance-focused partners like Sardine who are committed to an elevated and ever-evolving risk management model to implement fintech-enabled banking services.”

Skalicky added: “By leveraging our risk management and compliance expertise and Sardine’s advanced compliance and monitoring technology, we can provide greater access to a wider range of secure banking services and capabilities with built-in future compliance and risk management systems, proactively anticipating next- regulatory requirements.”

Sponsored fintechs can easily escalate suspicious customers or transactions to Stearns Bank via Sardine’s SOC2 Type 2 compliant platform. This robust case management system enables data sharing and dispositions without sharing critical personally identifiable information via email or other insecure message.

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