Connect launches Sentinela for iGaming, combining antifraud, MED disputes, reconciliation, and redundancy across nine banks

Connect, a payments technology provider, has introduced Sentinela, a platform built for iGaming operators that folds the full financial flow of a betting house into one integration, from player deposit to cash closing. For high-risk PSPs, the interesting part is not the branding; it is the plumbing: fraud controls, Mecanismo Especial de Devolução (MED) dispute handling, reconciliation, and bank redundancy all sitting in the same workflow.

1. According to Connect, each transaction processed by Sentinela goes through five steps: capture of data from the betting platform, risk analysis that checks operational limits and self-exclusion rules, a decision to approve, review, or block, recording in an auditable trail, and finally reconciliation between payment providers without relying on parallel spreadsheets.
2. The platform’s core feature is multibank redundancy. It is integrated with nine institutions: Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, BTG Pactual, BS2, Celcoin, Genial, Itaú, Sicoob, and Stark Bank. Connect says transaction traffic is distributed among them, and when one provider becomes unstable the system automatically reroutes transactions to the next one in line while logging the event for daily reconciliation.
3. On its website, Connect describes this setup as “active redundancy between multiple banks and financial providers,” with automatic failover in cases of unavailability and continuous performance monitoring across integrations. For operators, that translates into fewer single points of failure when one bank starts wobbling under load.
4. The company gives special attention to Pix, which it identifies as the main payment method for betting in Brazil. Sentinela monitors the behavior of the Sistema de Pagamentos Instantâneos (SPI) and each paying institution in real time, so it can identify when latency starts at the bank before the bettor notices the delay, and reroute traffic during peak periods such as nighttime.
5. The lifecycle of QR Code charges is also tracked by status — generated, expired, and paid — with an expiration rate calculated by time band. Another highlighted use case is defense in MED disputes: when a payer files a MED and the bank withholds the bettor’s balance and withdrawal, Sentinela assembles a dossier with deposit data, betting history, and KYC (know your customer) information to support the challenge within the deadline.

Connect also says Sentinela includes modules for antifraud, responsible gaming, and audit trail functions on the risk and compliance side, alongside gateway, Pix, and card components. For high-risk operators, that kind of bundling matters less as a feature list than as a way to reduce the number of moving parts between payment acceptance, dispute handling, and treasury reconciliation.