Fraud is no longer just a risk, but an expectation. In today’s environment, where fraud threats are increasing in volume, sophistication, and speed, orchestrating fraud defenses is crucial. Financial institutions must shift from siloed, reactive approaches to connected, proactive strategies.
Fraud is Growing, and Getting Smarter
Fraud in the financial services industry has become more complicated and coordinated, necessitating a focus on orchestrating fraud prevention. Organized rings are exploiting fragmented processes, while AI-driven tactics like deepfakes and bot attacks are enabling fraud at scale. At the same time, consumer expectations for fast and seamless onboarding mean that banks and lenders are forced to battle the constant tension between security and speed. Whether it’s synthetic identity creation, application fraud, or account takeovers, fraudsters are evolving faster than most systems can keep up.
55% of small businesses and 40% of large enterprises report being significantly affected by fraud, according to Citizens Bank’s 2025 Payment Trends Report. In particular, increased sophistication of fraudsters and coordinated attacks are behind those numbers.
Fraud losses in the U.S. could reach $40 billion by 2027, with synthetic identity fraud being one of the fastest-growing threats. Meanwhile, the emergence of generative AI tools has lowered the barrier for creating convincing fake documents, voices, and even live video, making fraud harder to detect and more scalable than ever before. This highlights the importance of orchestrating fraud prevention efforts in the financial services industry.
Disconnected Systems Are Part of the Problem
Most financial institutions rely on an array of point solutions, vendor tools, and internal databases that weren’t designed to work together. Fraud teams may be juggling multiple data feeds, decision engines, and manual processes – all of which introduce friction, delay, and risk.
This fragmentation leads to:
- Blind spots between systems that fraudsters can exploit
- Delayed responses due to a lack of real-time decisioning
- Inefficient operations from overlapping tools and unclear ownership
In a world where milliseconds matter, the lack of a cohesive fraud prevention strategy can lead to missed signals, higher false positives, and growing operational costs. When one type of fraud is solved, bad actors continue to find new and innovative ways to commit fraud. In a recent report from Datos Insights drawing on data collected from vendors and interviews with fraud prevention executives, 95% of participants highlighted siloed data across different systems was a challenge faced in combatting fraud effectively.
Data fragmentation also hinders frictionless customer journeys, often resulting in additional information inputs or fraud checks that risk an uptick in application abandonment. False positives are more than a CX issue – they’re a costly operational burden. Fraud incidents often generate ripple effects that go far beyond the initial loss, such as investigation costs, customer churn, and reputational damage. Siloed systems not only increase the chance of false declines, but they also drive up manual review workloads and reduce fraud teams’ ability to respond quickly.
To stay ahead, financial institutions need to move beyond simply adding more tools. The solution isn’t necessarily obtaining more data – it’s effectively orchestrating the data and tools you already have. When systems work together in real time, institutions gain the context and clarity needed to make confident, accurate fraud decisions without added friction.
Before Onboarding: Stopping Fraud at the Door
Fraud prevention starts long before the first transaction. Banks and credit unions must implement an orchestrated, multi-layered onboarding experience that balances friction with protection.
Here are some factors to consider:
- Dynamic identity verification based on risk signals, which allow you to only ask for more data from a customer when something seems off
- Cross-product insights that flag inconsistencies or links to past fraud
- Parallel execution of fraud models, using internal and third-party data simultaneously
- Synthetic identity detection by linking seemingly unrelated application signals
Over-relying on a single signal – like a credit score or document match – can leave institutions blind to deeper fraud patterns. Orchestration enables you to combine diverse signals, such as device risk and behavioral data, to evaluate applications holistically. This context-rich decisioning helps prevent fraud that would otherwise pass through narrow, one-dimensional checks.
After Onboarding: Continuous, Adaptive Monitoring
If recent years have showed us anything, it’s that the fight against fraud doesn’t stop at account creation. Financial institutions must maintain a living, breathing fraud strategy that can meet your needs beyond the initial onboarding process.
Some key capabilities to implement:
- Real-time behavioral monitoring, comparing account holder behavior with historical norms or averages
- Device and session intelligence, detecting anomalies like new device logins or session hijacking
- Feedback loops, so every confirmed fraud event refines future detection
- Modular and configurable rules and models, enabling faster responses to emerging threats
With orchestrated monitoring in place, financial institutions can analyze fraud signals not just within a single product but across the entire customer portfolio. If an account shows suspicious login activity on a mobile banking app, it can trigger an immediate check on the same customer’s credit card or loan accounts, stopping a lateral spread of fraud across your ecosystem.
Fraud doesn’t happen in isolation, and your detection strategy shouldn’t either. With the right data orchestration in place, institutions can conduct portfolio-wide reviews that connect insights across all customer accounts and products.
Unifying the Ecosystem through Advanced Orchestration
Institutions that implement orchestrated fraud prevention see tangible results across operations, customer experience, and risk management. Among the most meaningful outcomes:
- Faster fraud detection, reducing exposure time and losses
- Lower false positive rates, improving approval rates and customer satisfaction
- Greater agility, allowing teams to pivot strategies in hours, not weeks
- Fewer manual reviews, saving time and resources
- Improved collaboration, as fraud, credit, compliance, and product teams can share unified insights
Orchestration brings structure and intelligence to what’s often a chaotic environment. Zoot’s orchestration platform acts as the control center for your fraud prevention strategy, connecting every data point, decision rule, and risk signal into a unified flow. With over 400 pre-built connections to top-tier data providers and the flexibility to incorporate any internal or third-party system, Zoot empowers you to build a fraud ecosystem tailored to your institution’s needs.
Ready to unify your fraud prevention strategy and take control of your data? Get in touch with our team to learn how Zoot can help you design an orchestrated ecosystem, delivering the insights your teams need across the full customer journey.
