Sardine + FinQub: a signal source, on one record
If you landed here looking for a Sardine alternative, this is the honest answer: FinQub is not one. Sardine is a signal source. FinQub is the record its signals land on. Here is how they fit together, with a worked example.
Sardine is a signal source
Sardine produces fraud and risk intelligence: device signals, behavioral signals, and risk scores that help you tell a good customer or transaction from a bad one. It is one of the vendors that feeds a risk decision, in the same family as your KYC, KYB, sanctions, and transaction-monitoring tools. Each of those produces a signal about a customer.
FinQub is the record those signals land on
FinQub is the single source of truth for fintech risk decisions. It does not produce fraud scores. It reconciles the ones Sardine and your other vendors produce onto one record per customer. So a Sardine signal is not read in isolation in its own dashboard; it sits on the record next to the KYC result, the sanctions screen, and the monitoring output, where the decision is actually made.
A score is a signal, not a decision. Your rulebook or your analyst makes the call on the whole record, and FinQub records the decision, the signals it stood on, and the policy version that applied.
What that looks like on one transaction
A real example. The customer is Hemlock Financial. The transaction is a $15,000 outbound transfer. Sardine fires a fraud-high. Here is what the FinQub record shows in the same moment, and what the decision looks like with the whole picture.
Sardine's job did not change: it produced the fraud signal. FinQub's job was to put that signal next to the others, run it through your policy, record the decision with the full context, and keep it queryable. Different jobs. One record.
Side by side, on the dimensions buyers actually ask about
| Capability | Sardine | FinQub |
|---|---|---|
| Device intelligence (fingerprint, emulator, behavioral biometrics) | Yes | No |
| Behavioral signals (typing cadence, session patterns) | Yes | No |
| Fraud risk scoring at transaction or onboarding time | Yes | No |
| Reconcile fraud signals with KYC, KYB, sanctions, and monitoring signals | No | Yes |
| Hold one canonical record per customer across every vendor | No | Yes |
| Pin a decision to the policy version that applied at the time | No | Yes |
| Reconstruct any past decision as it stood, on one query | Partial | Yes |
| Surface vendor signals on a Subject view, not in a vendor-specific console | No | Yes |
| Examiner-ready signed exam packet for a Subject | No | Yes |
| Never resell your signals | Partial | Yes |
How they work together
Run Sardine for fraud and risk, run FinQub beneath it as the record. Sardine's signals land on the customer record alongside every other vendor, so the decision is made on the full picture, and the look-back an examiner runs later draws on the same complete record rather than a single fraud console. You keep your Sardine account and contract. FinQub never resells signals.
Sardine competitors: the fraud-signal landscape buyers actually shortlist
Fintech teams looking for a Sardine alternative usually end up comparing three categories of vendor. Each produces fraud signals in a slightly different shape. FinQub sits beneath whichever the team picks.
- Device-and-behavior specialists. Sardine, Sift, Forter, Riskified, Kount. Real-time device fingerprint, behavioral biometrics, and transaction-level risk scoring at authorization time. This is the category most buyers mean when they search “Sardine competitors”.
- ML-first fraud platforms. Oscilar, Featurespace, Feedzai. Built around custom ML models the team trains on its own fraud data, with the vendor providing the platform and monitoring rather than the score itself. Buyers comparing Oscilar vs Sardine are usually deciding between operating a fraud model themselves (Oscilar) versus consuming a fraud score as a service (Sardine).
- Compliance-adjacent orchestration and rule engines. Sardine also overlaps with tools that add rulebook and case-management layers on top of fraud signals. Alloy on the identity side and Unit21 on the AML side both touch adjacent territory but are not direct Sardine substitutes.
When a team compares Oscilar vs Sardine, or evaluates any two fraud-signal vendors, the choice affects which specific signals land on the customer record and how quickly they arrive. It does not change the shape of what the record needs to hold, or what the examiner will ask for later. FinQub is the record beneath any of them: whichever fraud vendor is picked, its signals land on the same Subject alongside the KYC, KYB, sanctions, and monitoring signals from other vendors, so the decision is made on the full picture and the look-back is a query, not an assembly job.
Frequently asked questions
Is FinQub a Sardine alternative?
No. Sardine produces fraud and risk signals, device intelligence, behavioral signals, and risk scores. FinQub does not produce those signals; it is the record they land on, alongside the signals from your KYC, KYB, sanctions, and monitoring vendors. You keep Sardine and run FinQub beneath it.
How does a Sardine score fit on the record?
A Sardine score is a signal. It lands on the same record per customer as your other vendor signals, so the decision is made on the whole picture rather than on the fraud score alone. The score informs the decision; your rulebook or your analyst makes it, and FinQub records both.
Why not just use Sardine's own dashboards?
Sardine's view is excellent for fraud, but it is one view among several. The KYC result, the sanctions screen, and the transaction-monitoring output live elsewhere. FinQub reconciles them onto one record so the decision, and the later look-back, draw on all of it, not one console at a time.
Does FinQub integrate with Sardine directly?
Yes. Sardine is a first-class signal source. Device intelligence, behavioral signals, risk scores, and dispute outcomes land on the Subject record as they arrive, tagged with timestamps and the score model that produced them. No batch jobs, no manual exports.
What if Sardine returns a fraud-high but the rest of the record looks clean? How does FinQub help?
That is the case that justifies a record beneath the signals. A fraud-high score in Sardine alone might trigger an automatic block. On the FinQub record, the same score sits next to a KYC pass, a KYB UBO confirmation, six months of clean monitoring, and a low Chainalysis exposure score. Your rulebook can weigh all of it, your analyst can review with the whole picture, and the decision (block, allow, escalate, or step up) is recorded against the full context. The look-back six months later shows why the call was made.
Can we swap Sardine for a different fraud vendor without losing history?
Yes. The record is vendor-agnostic by design. The fraud-signal slot on the Subject record can be filled by Sardine today and a different vendor tomorrow, and the historical record stays intact. The examiner sees one continuous history across the vendor change, not two disconnected systems.
FinQub runs on your own vendor stack. See how every vendor signal fits on one record, or book a short walkthrough below.