Oscilar

Calling all Bay Area risk, fraud, credit, and compliance leaders 👋 Oscilar is teaming up with Mastercard for RiskCon Bay Area: An evening of good food, good company, and honest conversation about what's actually working at the intersection of open finance and agentic risk decisioning. 🗓️ Tuesday, July 28 ⏰ 5:30–8:30 PM · Happy hour, then dinner and discussion 📍 British Bankers Club · Menlo Park Sachin Kulkarni and Saurabh Bajaj will both be there, and we'd love to see you too. Seats are limited and registration is subject to approval, so act swiftly. Link in comments.

Brazil is home to one of the world's most complex and fastest moving fraud environments. As we grow Oscilar's presence in Brazil, that makes the partners we choose especially important. Conta Azul has spent more than a decade helping over 100,000 SMBs manage their finances. As the company expands further into payments, its fraud team is taking on a broader set of challenges. From our first conversations, we were impressed by the team's knowledge of the local market, the questions they asked, and their belief that the people closest to fraud should have the tools to respond directly. With Oscilar, their operators can build, test, and deploy changes without waiting on engineering support. Reducing the distance between expertise and action is one of the main reasons we built Oscilar. In a market that moves as fast as Brazil's, that decides who survives and who withers away. The feedback from Conta Azul's leadership has been especially meaningful. They told us they had not encountered this level of capability in the Brazilian market for some time. Their confidence in what we are building is something we do not take lightly. Conta Azul is part of Visma, one of Europe's largest software groups, serving 2.1 million customers. This is an important step in Oscilar's growth in Brazil, and I am proud of the trust the Conta Azul team has placed in us. — O Brasil abriga um dos ambientes de fraude mais complexos e de rápida transformação do mundo e, à medida que expandimos a presença da Oscilar no Brasil, isso torna os parceiros que escolhemos especialmente importantes. A Conta Azul passou mais de uma década ajudando mais de 100.000 PMEs a gerenciar suas finanças. Com a expansão da empresa para o setor de pagamentos, sua equipe de fraude está assumindo um conjunto mais amplo de desafios. Desde nossas primeiras conversas, ficamos impressionados com o conhecimento da equipe sobre o mercado local, as perguntas que fizeram e sua convicção de que as pessoas mais próximas da fraude deveriam ter as ferramentas para responder diretamente. Com a Oscilar, seus times podem construir, testar e implantar mudanças sem depender do suporte de engenharia. Reduzir a distância entre o conhecimento especializado e a ação é uma das principais razões pelas quais construímos a Oscilar. Em um mercado que se move tão rápido quanto o brasileiro, isso é o que decide quem sobrevive e quem definha. O retorno da liderança da Conta Azul foi especialmente significativo. Eles nos disseram que não encontravam esse nível de capacidade no mercado brasileiro havia algum tempo. A confiança deles no que estamos construindo é algo que não levamos de forma leviana. A Conta Azul faz parte da Visma, um dos maiores grupos de software da Europa, que atende 2,1 milhões de clientes. Este é um passo importante no crescimento da Oscilar no Brasil, e tenho orgulho da confiança que a equipe da Conta Azul depositou no nosso time. 🇧🇷

"Decisiveness is critical, but it is widely misunderstood. [...] The decisiveness that matters is about direction: being unambiguous about where the company is going and why, and willing to make the hard calls that set that course." —Neha Narkhede on what it takes to lead a winning fintech team FinTech Futures caught up with our CEO and Co-founder following her Visionary CEO win at the Banking Tech Awards in New York City, where Oscilar also took home the award for Best PayTech Solution: Fighting Fraud.

Conta Azul 🤝 Oscilar "For us, fraud prevention is not only about stopping losses, it is becoming a strategic part of how Conta Azul grows. What I am most excited about is the pace we can work at now. We can test an idea, see how it performs, and put it into production ourselves. As we scale within Visma, that speed is what keeps us ahead." —Bruno Coconici Rodrigues, Head of Fraud at Conta Azul

ACH fraud monitoring used to be a big-bank requirement. Now with Phase 2 of Nacha's new Operating Rules active, that isn't the case anymore. Every RDFI and non-consumer Originator needs real-time, risk-based fraud monitoring in place, regardless of transaction volume. Phase 1 covered the high-volume players. They mostly had monitoring infrastructure already. Phase 2 reaches the segment that may not: community banks, credit unions, mid-market fintechs. Many of these institutions still run batch review, rules-based alerts, and morning queue management. "Risk-based monitoring" under Nacha isn't a checkbox. It means monitoring calibrated to actual risk exposure, reassessed annually, with controls you can show match your fraud profile rather than controls that simply exist. The institutions that handle this well build something defensible. The ones that don't stand up a static velocity rule, call it monitoring, and find out what "risk-based" means the first time an examiner asks. - In scope: All RDFIs and non-consumer Originators, regardless of volume. The previous threshold exemption is gone. - The standard: Risk-based, dynamic, reviewed annually. Not a static rule set built once and forgotten. - The gap: Most institutions newly swept in don't have real-time decisioning infrastructure. Batch review isn't the answer. Standing up controls is the visible part. Proving that they're risk-based is the part that doesn't expire.

Eight years ago I was sitting in a room at Goldman Sachs, trying to figure out how to detect fraud on a credit card that hadn't shipped yet. The Apple Card was months from launch. There were no transactions to model, no chargebacks to learn from, and no behavioral history for the people who would eventually carry one. My team at Feedzai had been brought in to build the fraud detection layer behind it, and the launch wasn't going to wait for the data to mature. The lesson I carried out of that room: you can't build risk infrastructure backwards from the data. You have to start from a thesis about which signals will matter, build the architecture to capture them from day one, and design feedback loops so the system gets sharper with every transaction. Seven years later, I'm in a room that looks the same. The product is different. Agent transaction rails are being built right now: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Google's AP2, Mastercard's Agent Pay, and ChatGPT Instant Checkout. The infrastructure for an AI agent to put your card on file and complete a purchase exists today, even though actual agentic commerce volume is close to zero. Most of the fraud stack hasn't reckoned with it yet because the data hasn't arrived. When it does, the foundation breaks. There's no human at the keyboard, the behavioral signature isn't keystrokes and mouse movement, and "is this the right person" no longer applies. Getting this right means building for it now, while the rails are still nascent. At Oscilar, we're treating agents as session actors. We classify sessions based on verification strength and behavioral trust signals, then risk teams apply policy accordingly. Because a valid credential does not guarantee an agent is still acting within the user's authorization, trust must be evaluated continuously. Seven years and several billion transactions later, the cold-start problem is the same. The signals are different.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent recently said something every risk and compliance leader should pay attention to: "...failure to adopt productivity-enhancing technology is its own risk." That's a major change. For years, the blocker was uncertainty around AI. Banks were ready to move, but compliance teams didn't have clear guardrails. That ambiguity slowed everything down. Now the signals are clearer. Treasury is engaging directly with banks and tech firms, publishing shared frameworks, and pushing AI higher on the regulatory agenda. Adoption is expected. Regulation isn't the bottleneck it once was. Now, it's infrastructure. Many banks still run risk and compliance on batch data and static rules. That doesn't hold up for real-time decisioning or explainable AI. The gaps show up quickly: → Data: Models are only as good as the inputs. Batch pipelines cap performance. → Governance: Explainability and monitoring need to be built in from the start. → Control: Risk teams should be able to adjust policies without waiting on engineering. Banks that already operate this way will move fast, while everyone else will feel the lag. The question now isn't whether financial institutions should adopt AI, but whether your stack can support it.

Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. As financial institutions review risk operations in 2026, they're asking: what next? Explore Oscilar’s playbook for risk-based fraud monitoring in 2026. Get the checklist: (https://hubs.la/Q04mj44R0).

Sometimes one of the best parts of a conference happens the night before it starts. Oscilar and Kaufman Rossin hosted a dinner for a group of AML and financial crime folks ahead of ACAMS Southern California Chapter annual symposium. Jason Chorlins, CPA, CFE and I walked in with a loose agenda and quickly found out that a room full of fincrime people does not need much prompting to talk about the topics they care about. A few things I kept hearing: - The AI debate is over. Nobody is arguing against it anymore, people are just keeping a list of vendors who oversold them and failed to live up to the excitement promised. - FRAML is not a trend, it is just how financial crime actually works. Job descriptions for titles on the org chart are becoming less siloed. - And no matter what we were talking about, someone eventually said "but how is my examiner going to see this." Every time. Without fail. You could be describing the most elegant solution in the world and there is already a person in the room mentally fearing the moment they have to explain it during their next examination. Good reminder of where the bar actually sits! Shout out of Natalie Najarian, Raymond Villanueva, CAMS, Emma Hewlin, Daniel Fals, and Christopher Tarabocchia for helping to put on an amazing dinner! Also, for figuring out how to get the USMNT on the TV ⚽