This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Nishant Tomar, Chairman and CEO of Chicago-based regtech startup DigsFact.
There has been a significant rise in AI driven fraud attempts that mimic customer identity and bypass rule-based fraud engines. DigsFact’s Agentic AI based fraud engine uses human-like reasoning at machine speed to prevent financial crime like fraud and money laundering in any transaction, in less than 1 millisecond. Transactions can be traditional, like check, ACH, wire and cards (credit, debit) or modern like RTP, A2A, Wallet to Wallet, etc. They can be domestic or cross-border or use digital currencies.
Nishant, tell us a bit about DigsFact. What problems are you solving? What makes your approach different?
DigsFact is a team of people who convert their dreams and aspirations into reality and tangible achievements with the power of Artificial Intelligence. Our proprietary product – The PreCogs (https://theprecogs.ai/) – was created to augment existing fraud and money laundering solutions to reduce financial crime and lower the cost of manual reviews.
While all existing financial crime (fraud and money laundering) solutions are focused on identity validation and authentication, we complement them by detecting financial crime based on behavioral anomalies and a dynamic rule engine that is evolving on its own. For example, every fraud attempt introduces brand new rules in our fraud engine, so that the fraudster is constantly chasing a moving target. We also predict new crime patterns before they emerge, keeping us one step ahead of the fraudsters.
What is your company’s origin story?
I have spent most of my career in financial services, so I was aware of fraud being a pain point, but I never knew the extent of the problem. When I met one of the executives of Swift at one of the conferences abroad, he shared how the problem of financial crime – fraud and money laundering – is growing worldwide despite all the existing solutions.
Coincidentally, when I returned home from that trip, my wife and I witnessed my brother-in-law lose a big chunk of money within a matter of minutes, while he was with us. I saw him getting a series of SMS alerts from his credit card as well as the bank that issued his debit card. By the time he called each of them, his bank account balance was almost nothing and his credit card was already maxed out. Without getting into the details of how this fraud occurred, this whole thing happened while he was trying to book a rental car – or at least that’s what my brother-in-law thought he was doing. I was there so I saw most of it LIVE, although I wasn’t paying much attention to what he was doing until he told me he is getting SMS alerts about the repeated money withdrawals.
Could this have been avoided? I am sure with the benefit of hindsight, we can think of ways to avoid it. However, I noticed how the fraudsters were using more sophisticated techniques and how creative they were in fooling someone. I also remembered the conversation I had with the Swift executive, at the conference I just came back from, about fraud being a global phenomenon. I realized that if nothing is done, it’s only a matter of time before these fraudsters play a trick on me or my kids at some point in the future.
We gather you’re a fan of the film Minority Report.
Yes 🙂 Love the movie. Loved the concept of preventing crime by detecting it before it happened. That’s why we named our product – The PreCogs – with 2 main differences:
- The movie had three precogs and we have two – one for fraud and the other for money laundering
- The movie was focused on preventing crime like murders while we are focused on preventing financial crime like fraud and money laundering.
Who is your target market?
We have operations in the US and India but our customers have operations worldwide.
- For customers – we are focused on financial institutions like banks, credit unions, and insurance companies.
- For partnerships – we are focused on partnering with existing fraud solutions that focus on ID validations and authentications where our Agentic AI approach compliment their solution to reduce false positives and missed detections.
Does your product augment or replace existing payment fraud solutions?
It augments existing payment fraud solutions.
Which Fintech Sandbox Data Partners have you worked with?
Equifax.
What milestones has DigsFact achieved so far?
- Crossed 25 millions transactions per day.
- Saved $2.8 million in median losses annually per customer.
- Reduced cost of manual reviews for our customers by 70%.
Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?
Fintech Sandbox offers a very unique value proposition for the startups – specially to fintechs. Any fintech founder can tell you that it is very helpful to have easy access to data partners, but even more importantly, there are opportunities to even partner together with those data partners, if the synergies exist. We have come a long way in the past 12 months, since joining the Fintech Sandbox community and we continue to look forward to collaborating further within the community.
What’s next for DigsFact?
We have enjoyed exceptional growth in the last two years and signed two major strategic partnership deals in the past six months. We continue to stay focused on surpassing our own growth record this year (2026) through continued strategic partnerships, where it makes sense. If you are interested in learning more, you can check out our website at https://theprecogs.ai/ or contact me at nishant@digsfact.com
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
To hear more about DigsFact and six additional exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!