National Bank of Canada is expanding its use of financial crime technology through a new multi-year partnership with Sardine, the San Francisco-based agentic risk platform.
The agreement will see National Bank deploy Sardine’s device intelligence and real-time risk scoring across its retail, commercial, and wealth solutions. The move follows a live evaluation in which Sardine improved fraud detection while reducing false positives, helping the bank cut unnecessary friction for customers.
The partnership also deepens National Bank’s financial commitment to Sardine. The bank is leading a $25 million Series C extension round in the company, bringing Sardine’s total funding to $170 million.
“After closely following Sardine’s growth and hearing strong feedback from existing customers, we decided to conduct an extensive evaluation of their platform,” said Joshuah Lebacq, Partner at NAventures, National Bank of Canada’s corporate venture capital arm. “The results gave us confidence to make Sardine a strong addition to our financial crime prevention operations and expand our commercial relationship.”
Lebacq said National Bank is also encouraged by Sardine’s use of agentic AI in risk and compliance.
“We’re excited about the potential of agentic AI, especially in the risk and compliance sphere, and Sardine’s financial crime agents are setting the standard for the category,” he added.
National Bank is one of Canada’s six systemically important banks, with $606 billion in assets as of January 31, 2026. The bank serves approximately 2.7 million clients globally and operates across personal and commercial banking, wealth management, capital markets, and U.S. specialty finance and international markets.
Sardine’s platform is designed to help financial institutions detect fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and anti-money laundering operations. The company says its fraud consortium spans more than six billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and three million businesses worldwide.
“Sardine was built for banks that need to stop fraud without slowing down their loyal customers,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO and co-founder of Sardine. “National Bank of Canada is one of the most respected financial institutions in North America, and we’re proud to support their financial crime operations as they continue to set the standard for digital banking in Canada.”
The partnership adds to Sardine’s momentum with financial institutions, including banks and wealth managers looking for more scalable tools to combat financial crime as digital banking threats become more sophisticated.
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