A HeronPay, a Brazilian payment intelligence and management startup, announces its market entry with an innovative payment intelligence platform focused on fraud prevention, smart expense management, and real-time controls, with intensive use of artificial intelligence (AI). The solution, approved at Fintech Lounge at FebrabanTech 2025, combines unified data, predictive models, near real-time analytics, and voice command controls, ‘Voice Your Controls’ (VYC), providing a safer, customizable, and proactive payment experience for banks and businesses to offer to end users.
How the platform works
HeronPay combines and unifies all payment credentials, cards (credit, debit, prepaid), PIX, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, WhatsApp, among others), tokens, and tags, offering real-time personalized controls. The platform allows bank customers to define specific rules by merchant category, such as pharmacies, gas stations, gambling, restaurants, as well as time restrictions, spending limits, geolocation, and planned future events—all with one-click or voice command activation or modification.
Based on this data and a unified view of transactions, HeronPay provides financial institutions with structured data even before transaction authorization, anticipating the processor and enabling proactive fraud prevention.
“Anti-fraud by design” solution with AI
By deploying sentinel AIs in the customer journey, HeronPay positions itself as a solution capable of analyzing transactional data and extracting unique behavioral patterns. The platform blocks unauthorized transactions before they even occur, including cases of friendly fraud, clean fraud, or misuse by family members and employees. This technology also reduces operational costs by minimizing expenses related to customer service, chargebacks, and internal verification processes.
“The key differentiator of the platform lies in delivering a unified, real-time view of the customer, embedded within bank infrastructure. It’s an AI-first through payments rails, enabling intelligent decisions even before the transaction,” explains Luanna Vargas Shirozono, co-founder of HeronPay and a statistics and economics expert with extensive experience in the payments industry.
The platform can collect, unify, and make transactional data available almost instantly after an operation occurs, using Analytics Near Real Time. This approach allows banks’ internal systems and AIs to act proactively and strategically with a unified view of customer payment behavior. In practice, this enables smart controls, personalized alerts, fraud prevention, and automated decision-making in real-time without negatively impacting financial institutions’ internal processes.
Benefits for financial institutions
The platform is designed not to overload banks’ internal IT processes, implemented via modular APIs with scalability and ease of testing. Additionally, it provides enriched data for banks’ AI models and consumer behavior analysis. With this, banks can:
– Reduce fraud and operational costs;
– Launch new products faster;
– Better engage their retail and corporate clients;
– Implement flexible limits, alerts, and real-time smart blocks;
– Offer competitive differentiators in the market.
“We transform payment methods into flexible, intelligent solutions tailored to users’ needs. The platform empowers customers to protect themselves from scams and fraud before they even occur,” highlights Douglas Lopes da Silva, co-founder of HeronPay and a PhD engineer in electronics and computing with AI expertise in the financial sector.
Use cases: From parental controls to fleet management
HeronPay’s flexibility allows for customized products across multiple scenarios:
Parental controls: Setting spending limits and blocking categories like bars or gambling on teenagers’ cards.
Caregivers: Configuring restricted cards and PIX for categories like pharmacies and supermarkets to protect the elderly from scams.
Travel: Preemptive spending controls by time, location, and merchant, including voice commands.
Events and sports: Activate spending limits by event or occasion.
Fleet management: Automated control over fuel, parking, and corporate travel expenses.
Nighttime itinerary: A protected journey for the next few hours, whether planning dinner at a restaurant or other nighttime activities.
Social program management: Blocks for prohibited categories per internal policies, such as gambling, with traceability and real-time alerts.
The platform also automates expense reports, categorizes transactions, and enables full spending tracking by merchant category.
“We’re helping banks build trust-based relationships with their customers. HeronPay brings a new level of personalization for end users with control, security, and convenience. It’s a new generation of smart payment solutions,” says Luanna.
A new frontier in payments
The platform’s vision is ambitious: to create a framework combining payment interoperability and cutting-edge real-time AI, where the customer is central. With this, the startup aims to solve the ‘payment data unification problem’ still plaguing the industry—an issue not just about technology but strategy, payments expertise, and business vision.
“What you don’t measure, you can’t improve. HeronPay offers banks and fintechs a powerful tool for control, analytics, messaging, and continuous innovation—unifying customer payment data, preventing fraud with sentinel AIs, and managing expenses, solving many market pain points,” concludes Lopes.
