Feedzai, a company that offers a platform that helps financial companies detect and prevent fraud and other financial crime, announced this week that it acquired Demyst, which helps banks manage their access to numerous external data sources available for identity verification.
The deal brings Demyst’s platform, named Zonic, into Feedzai’s RiskOps platform, which Feedzai hopes will mitigate data siloing and accelerate risk decisions. Zonic connects banks to a mix of APIs, bulk files, streams and other external data sources using so-called connectors, metadata management and automated schema standardization.
Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao said that layering Demyst’s data-access capabilities onto Feedzai’s AI models will help banks “access the right data as quickly as possible so that you can accelerate risk decisions with the fewest consumer friction points.”
The acquisition comes as banks prioritize fraud mitigation in their 2025 technology budgets, including monitoring real-time payments. While checks remain the top fraud concern for banks, according to
Demyst, founded in 2010, built a managed platform currently used by more than 100 banks and insurers to ingest external data for use cases including know-your-customer compliance, credit decisions, risk management and marketing, according to its website. These external data sources can include government databases, sanctions lists, device fingerprints, behavioral biometrics vendors, credit bureaus and others.
“External data is the next frontier of business impact for financial institutions, yet it is notoriously complex, involving a labyrinth of sources for KYC/AML, identity, fraud, credit checks and compliance,” said Mark Hookey, CEO of Demyst, in
Demyst says Zonic lets nontechnical teams spin up connectors — single interfaces for external data sources — and monitor data flows without heavy IT involvement, a capability that Feedzai sees as complementary to its AI-native transaction-monitoring, account-opening and watchlist-screening modules.
Zonic also allows users to create and deploy so-called workflows, which define the steps involved in retrieving, processing and integrating external data into a uniform, real-time data API. It also enables large datasets to be delivered into existing data infrastructure such as Snowflake or Amazon Web Services products.
From a bank’s perspective, a more seamless data pipeline can reduce false positives, speed onboarding and improve AML/compliance workflows.
Demyst says it adheres to a variety of security and compliance frameworks, including SOC 2 Type II, a security framework for auditing and reporting the security controls a company has in place on an ongoing basis and the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Feedzai said integrating Demyst into its platform will offer a unified interface for fraud prediction, AML transaction monitoring, know-your-customer and other RiskOps tasks, drawing on both in-house and third-party data sources in real time.
Demyst competes in the market of external data management and orchestration platforms that focus on financial data aggregation. Some of its competitors include Atlan, Collibra, Explorium, Codat and Tamr.
Feedzai competes in the market of financial crime detection and prevention. Its competition includes Socure, SEON, Sift, Ondato, Unit21, BioCatch and others.