Milan, 29th May 2025 — Cleafy, the European cybersecurity company proving that Autonomous Fraud Operations can run safely at production scale inside regulated banking environments, has been named 5th in TechRound's Fintech 50 2026, the annual ranking that spotlights the most innovative fintech companies shaping the future of financial services. The recognition follows the launch of Nyx, Cleafy's product operationalising Autonomous Fraud Operations inside regulated banking environments - in production at one of Europe's largest financial groups since December 2025, and with three further deployments underway this quarter.
The Fintech 50 selection celebrates companies that not only deliver breakthrough technology but also redefine how the financial industry operates. Cleafy's inclusion validates a thesis the company has held since its founding in 2014: that the intelligence required to protect digital banking does not live in the model, but in the data structure beneath it. A decade later, that bet has produced the foundation on which Nyx runs.
An operating model proven in production
Nyx is the foundation that enables autonomous fraud operations inside regulated banking environments by continuously correlating signals, reconstructing coordinated campaigns, and resolving fraud cases across systems without fixed playbooks. Where human-bounded operating models sample and triage, Nyx executes at machine scale across every alert, every campaign, and every rule, 24/7.
Nyx is built on Cleafy’s decade-deep data foundation, a continuously updated, machine-readable record of digital banking activity that enables autonomous reasoning at machine speed, with institutional-grade precision.
"Fraudsters have been operating at AI scale for years. Their targets have been operating at human scale. Nyx closes that asymmetry by replacing the operating model and freeing the people inside it to work where judgment actually matters," said Matteo Bogana, CEO and Co-founder of Cleafy. "Being recognised by TechRound among Europe's most innovative fintech companies is confirmation that the market is ready for what we've been building toward for over a decade. Autonomous operations are no longer a future vision: they are shipping, in production, inside regulated Tier-1 banks today."
Why this matters now
The financial services industry is facing a structural breaking point. Generative AI has accelerated fraudster reconnaissance and exploitation up to 47x faster than human response times, while 81% of fraud campaigns now include cyber components such as phishing, malware, session hijacking, and credential theft. The core constraint is no longer visibility of fraud activity, but the operating model used to respond to it. Most fraud operations were designed for linear, human-bounded workflows: case-by-case handling, sequential queues, and manual triage that assumes isolated events and controlled volume.
Industrialised fraud breaks this assumption. It produces correlated activity across multiple signals that must be analysed and resolved as coordinated patterns, not individual alerts.
This creates a structural bottleneck in which operational capacity, not detection capability, determines the effective response.
Nyx replaces this model with Autonomous Fraud Operations in production. This shifts fraud operations from human-rate limited processing to continuous, machine-scale execution across all signals. The result is a 77x increase in throughput and resolution cycles from 4-5 hours to under 5 minutes.
The recognition from TechRound comes as European banks face mounting regulatory pressure under DORA, NIS2, and EBA/ECB payment fraud reporting requirements, which demand auditable, traceable, and consistent fraud operations processes. Nyx was built for this environment from day one.
Open architecture, existing infrastructure
Cleafy currently protects 173 financial institutions and 250+ million end users across Europe and Latin America, and holds 85+ patents in digital banking fraud defence. The company's open-ecosystem approach means Nyx integrates with existing SIEM, identity, transaction monitoring, and threat intelligence stacks — making the bank's existing investments more valuable, not redundant.
The full TechRound Fintech 50 list, including Cleafy's profile, is available here.
About Cleafy
Cleafy is the fraud management platform for banks, trusted by over 173 financial institutions. Its modular architecture spans attack prediction, real-time detection and response, autonomous investigation, workforce protection, and global threat intelligence. Nyx is Cleafy's autonomous investigation and defence optimisation product. Founded in Milan, with offices in Milan, Madrid and London.
