Key takeaway: Merchants and compliance teams often treat faster onboarding and stronger verification as opposing goals. This data suggests that’s the wrong frame. The firms seeing the best fraud outcomes aren’t slowing transactions down. They’re moving verification earlier into the process, catching fraud before settlement instead of after.
New PYMNTS Intelligence data finds that 90% of firms link stronger fraud infrastructure to faster customer onboarding. The finding reframes fraud prevention as an enabler of growth, not just a brake on risk.
The data comes from “Payment Protection: Why Firms Still Aren’t Real-Time Ready,” a PYMNTS Intelligence report produced with Plaid. It’s based on a double-blind survey of 150 senior executives across seven industries that move large volumes of money. Companies that modernized their payment and fraud infrastructure saw real returns. Sixty-eight percent reported lower fraud losses after modernizing. The same share reported fewer payment failures and returns. Manual review workload dropped for 76% of firms.
Real-time verification made the biggest difference. Among firms that verify account ownership in real time, 60% detect fraud immediately or within minutes. Only 39% of firms without real-time verification can say the same. Real-time verifiers were also more than twice as likely to catch fraud before money moved, at 21% versus 10%.
Even so, a gap remains between the tools firms have and the results they get. Fifty-seven percent of firms said fraud attempts increased over the prior year. Forty-seven percent still can’t detect suspected fraud in real time or within minutes. Just 49% use secure bank connectivity to generate real-time fraud signals, even though nearly all firms already have that connectivity available.
A related but separate PYMNTS Intelligence and Plaid report from earlier this year, “Early Detection: Why Top-Performing Firms Focus on Fraud Before It Starts,” adds context. It found that 57% of middle-market firms still detect payment fraud or nonclearance only after settlement, when recovery options are far more limited. That’s a distinct finding from a different survey, but it points to the same broad theme. Many firms are still finding out about fraud too late to do much about it.
Looking ahead, firms plan to close some of these gaps. Seventy percent expect to adopt or expand payment reconciliation automation over the next 12 months. Sixty-five percent plan identity verification and know-your-customer automation. Fifty-nine percent plan secure bank connectivity or AI-based fraud detection.
Why it matters: The data suggests fraud infrastructure has become a genuine growth lever for merchants and issuers, not just a compliance cost. Firms that invest in real-time account verification see faster detection and stronger customer-facing outcomes. Eighty-seven percent of executives linked modernized infrastructure to fewer customer-service inquiries and fewer late or missed payments. Eighty-three percent saw higher customer satisfaction. Fraud prevention, in other words, pays off in the customer experience, not just in avoided losses.
Source: PYMNTS