Hi Fintech Futurists,
Welcome back to our podcast series! For those that want to subscribe in your app of choice, you can find us at Apple, Spotify, or on RSS.
In this conversation, we chat with Soups Ranjan, the co-founder and CEO of Sardine.AI, a VC funded company with the mission to “confidently load money into a digital wallet”, where Sardine takes care of fraud and compliance issues related to money movement and instantly funds the money in the wallet.
Prior to founding Sardine, Soups was head of crypto for Revolut and head of data & risk for Coinbase. He has held roles in cyber security and AI/Machine Learning at many Silicon Valley companies over the last 15 years. Soups also holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice Univ where his thesis was on preventing application layer DDoS attacks. One of his lifelong passions is matching wits against fraudsters and he founded a popular risk community called RiskSalon that allowed many companies to learn from each other.
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Timestamp
1’20”: Early experiences building things and passions
4’10”: Financial crime, bad actors, malware, spam and botnets
7’52”: The sophistication of criminal counterparties
11’01”: How Coinbase and Revolut approach to large interactions of crypto assets
16’51”: Building Sardine.ai (fraud prevention and compliance infrastructure) to counteract major issues of digital financial fraud
20’37”: The progress of Sardine.ai in metrics and statistics
21’28”: Sardine.ai’s feature set and the natural progression of such features
23’43”: The value proposition of Sardine.ai relative to other compliance offerings
26’22”: The acceptance of Sardine.ai by financial institutions across different juristictions
27’37”: The broader compliance platform and plans for the future
32’00”: Channels to use to connect with Soups and/or to learn more about Sardine.ai
Sneak Peek:
Soups Ranjan:
…if you want to keep your money safe, then maybe you should do what my wife does, which is where she doesn't have an online account, she just walks in into the bank physically and only provides instructions in person verbally to the bank teller. So that's what I meant. That would be the stone ages if all of us had to do that. In other words, money, once it started moving digitally, has made it easier for fraud to happen, and we need to solve for that challenge.
Lex Sokolin:
Gotcha. Absolutely. This would be a convenient time to have statistics on the number of armed robberies of banks in the 19th and 20th centuries and see if those have gone down as digital fraud has gone up. I am very fascinated by the idea of just how sophisticated the technology is on the other side in terms of spoofing, in terms of botnets, and in terms of figuring out exactly what it is that will get people to make bad decisions and click on the wrong link or share their addresses. If we switch to your time at Coinbase and Revolut, where you're looking at very large interactions with crypto assets for millions and millions of people, can you talk about the types of things that you are exposed to there and what kinds of approaches you were able to try to combat these problems?
Soups Ranjan:
Yeah, absolutely. One thing that is really fascinating about crypto is if you solve for fraud at a crypto exchange, then you have solved for it pretty much everywhere else, because…
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