How Pixpay built an “in-house-like” Fraud & Compliance platform with Marble

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At a Glance

• Client: Pixpay, provides a payment card for teenagers, managed by their parents.
• The challenge: PixPay's users behave very differently compared to standard adult behavior, they needed their risk and compliance programs to match their reality. This implied migrating from a restrictive Banking-as-a-Service model to an independent risk stack, without overburdening the engineering team.
• The solution: Adopting Marble, an ultra flexible, open-source-based Fraud & Compliance platform to centralize AML and fraud monitoring.
• Key result: Complete autonomy over risk rules, a 2-day technical integration time, and a centralized workflow from detection to investigation for the risk and compliance team.

The challenge: outgrowing the "all-in-one" model

Pixpay is a fintech company founded in 2019 that provides payment cards specifically for teenagers, managed by their parents. Initially, the company relied on a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) partner to handle the heavy regulatory lifting, including Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and risk monitoring.

As Pixpay scaled, this "all-in-one" model began to show its limits. The team faced rising costs and a lack of control over their risk strategy. To support their next phase of growth, Pixpay made the strategic decision to bring their tech stack and risk management in-house.

The main question they were struggling with was the build or buy dilemma: should they build a complex risk engine from scratch, distracting developers from the core product? Or should they go for the speed of a SaaS, potentially at the expense of flexibility?

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The solution: Marble as the central risk hub

After evaluating nearly ten different solutions, including offerings from major tech giants, they chose Marble. The decision was driven by Marble's unique combination of open-source architecture and extreme flexibility.

Guillaume Brunson, Chief of Banking, explains:

Marble relies on an open data model, mirroring your data warehouse. This means you can feed in any data, thus the unlimited flexibility to build any rule, truly matching any possible use cases, current or future.

Unlike traditional banking tools designed for standard adult accounts, Marble allowed Pixpay to build custom scoring logic tailored to the unique behaviors of teenagers (e.g., lower transaction limits, specific device checks).

Why Pixpay chose Marble:

• Safety in open source: The open-source core provided "tech insurance," ensuring Pixpay would never be locked into a vendor or lose access to their logic.
• Customizable logic: They could link distinct entities: users, parents, devices and create sophisticated behavioral scores rather than simple, isolated alerts.
• Developer-friendly: The platform fit seamlessly into their modern tech stack.

If we were going to choose a SaaS, we didn't want to be tied hand and foot... Marble open-source core is really what reassured us: the transparency and flexibility of Build, with the speed of Buy.

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The implementation: fast, safe, and seamless

Migrating a live financial product is high-stakes work, but the integration with Marble was exceptionally fast.

• Rapid Deployment: The cloud infrastructure was up and running in just 2-3 days.
• The "Shadow" Phase: To ensure safety, Pixpay ran Marble in "shadow mode" alongside their previous provider and internal scripts.
• Verification: Once the decisions from Marble perfectly matched their internal calculations, they unplugged the old systems.

Guillaume explains:

It was very fast to integrate; I think in 2 or 3 days our cloud was available, and we started processing transactions. Being able to test it very quickly on production data was exactly what we needed: rigor and safety.

The outcome: operational excellence

Today, Marble serves as the central nervous system for Pixpay’s compliance operations.

• Centralized Investigation: Julie Pessey, Operation risk and compliance Manager, and her team use Marble as their single source of truth. It aggregates data from multiple sources (transactions, AML alerts, sanctions lists) into one dashboard.
• Automated Action: Decisions made in Marble trigger immediate actions in the Pixpay app, automatically blocking high-risk sign-ups or freezing suspicious transactions without manual intervention.
• Daily Reliance: The tool has become indispensable for the operational workflow.

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Conclusion

By partnering with Marble, Pixpay successfully navigated the transition to independence.

They gained the agility to define their own risk appetite and the technical stability of a robust, modern platform, all while keeping their engineering team focused on building the best banking experience for teens.

Guillaume Brunson conclusion illustrates the two companies partnership level:

Ultimately, what sealed the deal for us was the accessibility of the team. We know Marble vision and Tech DNA align with ours and that the platform will evolve in the direction we need.