EXCLUSIVE: “The AI Balancing Act” – Joel Winteregg, Antoine Cuypers and Alexandre Guidou, Vyntra in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Data transparency and transaction security are two sides of the same coin. By bringing together specialists in each and leveraging AI across a single platform, Vyntra has amplified their powers

In an era where payments move at the speed of light and fraudsters are never far behind, banks face a defining challenge: how to keep transactions fast, frictionless… and safe.

That delicate balance between efficiency and security is precisely where Vyntra, a new fintech born from the merger of Belgium’s Intix and Switzerland’s NetGuardians, aims to make its presence felt. Formed in June 2025 and backed by Summa Equity, Vyntra unites two specialist companies that were already pursuing the same vision from different perspectives – Intix, providing deep visibility into payment flows, and NetGuardians, deploying advanced AI to detect and prevent fraud.

Together, they promise to give banks a single, intelligent platform that can monitor, analyse, and protect every transaction in real time – without slowing it down.

“We are forming Vyntra to solve a very unique problem for banks,” says its CEO Joel Winteregg. “They need to find the right balance between payment risk and payment security. Our mission is to provide tools that enable speed monitoring of payments – what we call transaction observability – and risk reduction through AI fraud prevention.

“We have joined those two solutions together to really deliver a one-stop shop for banks.”

Both firms had been (and in their new form, continue to be) part of the Summa Equity portfolio – Intix since 2022, NetGuardians since 2024 – and the synergies between them were clear. Intix built its reputation helping financial institutions gain real-time visibility over transaction data, enabling compliance teams and operations specialists to trace payments instantly and identify anomalies.

NetGuardians, meanwhile, focussed on AI-driven fraud detection. Its technology applied behavioural analytics and machine learning to distinguish legitimate transactions from suspicious ones, thus reducing false positives and saving banks time and money. By combining these capabilities under one roof, Vyntra becomes a transaction-intelligence platform that ‘unites data observability with predictive analytics’, effectively blending the worlds of compliance, operational resilience, and fraud prevention.

“Customers today are ready to sacrifice a little bit of speed on their payments to ensure there is less risk,” Winteregg says, referencing The Hidden Tension In Every Payment, a recent Vyntra study of 1,000 banking customers worldwide “That tells us we are moving in the right direction – banks need to deliver speed and safety together.”

At the heart of Vyntra’s proposition is the idea that trust comes from transparency. If banks can monitor every step of a transaction’s lifecycle, not just technically, but from a business perspective, they can spot issues early, communicate better with customers, and prevent problems before they escalate.

“It’s all about the customer experience,” says Antoine Cuypers, Director of Strategic Alliances and Key Accounts at Vyntra. “Speed has become a commodity. If a transaction is processed on time, no one notices. But if something goes wrong, customers will certainly let you know.

“That’s where visibility makes a real difference, ensuring transactions remain frictionless across their lifecycle. Transaction observability gives financial institutions a single version of the truth across departments. You’re able to monitor in real time the health of your flows from a business perspective, not simply a technical one.”

For banks, real-time observability isn’t only about customer satisfaction, it’s about resilience. Payment interruptions or fraud incidents can cause reputational damage and regulatory headaches, not to mention lost revenue. Winteregg says Vyntra’s software helps banks monitor the resilience of payments to avoid outages or blackouts, while also safeguarding transactions against fraud and money-laundering schemes.

“We want to help banks to be proactive,” he explains. “We bring them the software suites – AI fraud prevention, money-laundering detection, and transaction observability – that solve the two biggest issues for a head of payments: ensuring payments flow smoothly and securely.”

Social engineering attacks have exploded in recent years, as criminals exploit human trust as well as technical vulnerabilities. Vyntra is on that battlefront, offering specific tools to detect and prevent various types of fraud, including Authorised Push Payment (APP) scams and phishing.

“Scams are a worldwide disease,” says Winteregg. “We’ve all received those messages claiming to be from our bank, urging us to act fast. Customers believe they’re sending money to a trusted source – sometimes even to someone famous. It’s happening everywhere.

“Detecting such scams is difficult because, technically, the customer initiates the payment. The challenge is to have tools powerful enough, like ours, to detect that and to convince the customer that they are doing something strange.”

He believes customer education is a key part of the story, and so too is collaboration.

“No single bank will solve this alone. By sharing data on fraudulent activities through community scoring, banks can become more powerful together. That’s how we prevent fraud on a global scale,” he says.

Within Vyntra, AI is the driver; the intelligence that learns from billions of transactions and continuously adapts to new threats. Alexandre Guidou, Associate Director at Vyntra, says the company focusses on the most pressing types of financial crime: scams, account takeovers, and money-laundering techniques such as ‘smurfing,’ where criminals break large sums into smaller deposits to avoid detection.

“For these scenarios, we take a proactive approach,” Guidou explains. “We learn the usual habits of customers and detect suspicious behaviour in real time. AI allows us to generate new layers of due diligence at the customer level, dynamically and continuously.

“And as fraudsters evolve quickly, we use two approaches to stay ahead. First, we leverage what banks know best – their customers. We learn from their behaviour and compare them with peers to assess risk.

“Second, we ingest third-party data from the market, such as suspicious beneficiaries reported by other institutions, and orchestrate that information to boost our fraud-detection performance. It’s about combining internal insight with external intelligence.”

Cuypers argues that secure data-sharing between partners will become a cornerstone of modern payment resilience. “In areas like cross-border payments or remittances, every participant is performing similar compliance checks,” he notes. “If we can reuse the richness of ISO 20022 standards and pass validated data securely along the chain, we’ll save everyone a lot of hassle and cost. Collaboration will be essential.”

That vision aligns with the broader industry trend known as FRAML – the convergence of fraud and anti-money-laundering systems into one cohesive framework. By combining detection capabilities and sharing data across functions, banks can uncover patterns that isolated teams might miss.

“The current challenge for banks is to break the silos,” says Guidou. “At both the analytical and operational levels, fraud prevention and compliance need to learn from each other. Using AI, we can make that collaboration seamless.”

Vyntra’s launch comes at a pivotal time. Financial institutions are under pressure from regulators and customers alike to strengthen defences without compromising user experience. The company already serves more than 130 institutions in more than 60 countries, supported by a workforce of around 150 people, spanning 25 nationalities.

For Winteregg, that illustrates how universal the problem has become.

“Every bank, everywhere, is facing the same dilemma,” he says. “How do we make payments fast, resilient, and secure? Vyntra brings those worlds together.

“As a company, we are at the beginning of an exciting journey. We’re moving forward to bring that new balanced approach to create a single point of management for risk, efficiency and trust in payments, all at the speed that consumers demand.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #37, Page 14-15

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