Fraud coordination strengthens trust throughout the payments process

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Fraud coordination strengthens trust throughout the payments process

Fraud prevention is no longer about a single tool or team; it's a coordinated ecosystem. As digital transactions scale and fraud strategies evolve, Fraud orchestration has become the missing layer connecting risk signals, verification systems and payment gateways. This tracker explores how fraud orchestration can transform fragmented defenses into unified intelligent protection.

What is fraud orchestration and why it’s important

Merchants must strike a balance between preventing fraud and minimizing payment friction, which can prevent legitimate customers from purchasing. Fraud orchestration helps achieve this balance.

Fraud prevention today requires a multi-layered approach.

Spreedly noted that the increasing complexity of digital payments has created an equally complex attack surface, turning static tools into blind spots against adaptive threats. As payment technology evolves, so do the tactics of fraudsters. Fraudsters will deploy bots, account takeovers, synthetic identities, and friendly fraud tactics simultaneously, then shift gears once merchants close the gap. Legacy rules engines catch familiar patterns but miss new signals. Additionally, while machine learning (ML) models can detect anomalies, they still require contextual signals from identity and behavioral tools.

85%

of merchants cite reducing friction for legitimate customers as their biggest challenge Fraud prevention.

At the same time, merchants must protect not only the transaction itself, but also the broader revenue journey. Payment optimization and fraud prevention are closely linked—gaps in one layer can lead to friction, false rejections, or lost conversions in the other. Fraud coordination helps protect revenue by ensuring risk checks, identity verification and payment routing work together rather than in silos.

Simply put, fraud has become too dynamic and complex for a single layer of defense to keep pace. Fraud orchestration emerges to unify these layers and ensure risk decisions evolve as quickly as the threats they address.

Effectively combating fraud cannot come at the expense of customer experience.

Despite the growing threats, merchants are still under pressure to strike the right balance between friction and protection. According to a Riskified survey, 85% of merchants said their biggest challenge is preventing fraud without degrading the customer experience. Nearly half (47%) of respondents estimate that as many as 5% of legitimate customer orders are incorrectly rejected as fraudulent, costing the industry an estimated $50 billion in lost revenue.

Spreedly's 2025 State of Checkout report confirms that error flags remain the leading cause of checkout failures for some merchants, while 36% of merchants have added redundant fraud tools to cope with provider outages. With merchants often managing five or more payment integrations, fragmentation itself becomes a source of friction, so orchestration is critical.

Orchestration optimizes multiple goals simultaneously.

Fraud orchestration eliminates the trade-off between security and customer experience by integrating risk signals and decisions into unified adaptive workflows. Rather than relying on siled vendors, orchestration fuses authentication, behavioral analytics, device intelligence, and transaction risk scoring into a real-time assessment engine.

Research shows that AI-powered, multi-layered fraud controls can reduce false positives and improve decision accuracy, while advanced fraud management methods can also support higher transaction approval rates by reducing unnecessary rejections. With instant payments and embedded commerce compressing the decision window, these capabilities provide key advantages. Fraud orchestration protects revenue, streamlines checkout, and maintains customer trust in every channel by routing transactions through optimal checks—and only intensifying scrutiny when the risk justifies it.

From decentralized security to unified security: Fraud orchestration in action

Fraud orchestration is a command and control platform that allows organizations to integrate multiple components into a single system.

Orchestration eliminates the need for redundancy in your fraud prevention strategy.

According to Datos Insights, as fraudsters learn to exploit the gaps between different payment systems and channels, emerging fraud threats are forcing organizations to modify (or “iterate”) their prevention strategies more frequently to ensure they are protected. Orchestration platforms enable organizations to connect to a range of different solution providers through a single platform that can integrate internal data sources and analyze and assess risks within existing workflows.

As a result, fraud orchestration reimagines defense from a patchwork of tools to a coordinated, intelligent system. Spreedly describes it as sequencing risk checks like an air traffic controller: Each tool plays to its strengths, but orchestration determines the correct order and conditions for use. This prevents over-verification of trusted customers while increasing control over suspicious traffic. Layered defenses that combine behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting, rules engines, and machine learning scoring reduce fraud losses and minimize false positives. Operational efficiencies are also improved: Centralized orchestration relieves the burden of managing multiple integrations, speeds iteration of fraud strategies, and enables targeted use of cost-effective vendors across use cases.

There has been a corresponding increase in the implementation of fraud orchestration.

As fraud escalates across channels, more organizations are turning to orchestration to unify detection, reduce manual overhead, and accelerate strategic response. Datos Insights reports that 53% of U.S. financial institutions (FIs) already use fraud orchestration, 16% are implementing it, and 26% plan to adopt it. It notes that the orchestration platform integrates application programming interfaces (APIs), third-party signals, internal data and an ML-based scoring engine into a single decision-making layer capable of millisecond-level evaluation. These systems also enable A/B testing of tools, centralized rules deployment, unified case management, and cross-channel visibility, capabilities that are critical for fraudsters to exploit gaps between payment flows. The result is a more agile, data-driven and scalable fraud posture.

Some key examples illustrate these solutions.

Spreedly acquires Dodgeball to embed fraud orchestration directly into its open payments stack, enabling merchants to intuitively design and deploy branched fraud workflows without the need for custom coding. Each authentication, scoring, or authorization step becomes a programmable node, giving teams precise control over friction and risk.

Industry momentum is accelerating. Datos Insights recently ranked LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ACI Worldwide as leading providers in the fraud orchestration market, delivering real-time risk decision-making and flexible deployment options in large-scale environments. Meanwhile, Zoot Solutions’ full lifecycle orchestration model, spanning onboarding, monitoring and decision-making, further demonstrates how orchestration can be the unifying layer for adaptive enterprise risk control.

Why Fraud Orchestration Belongs to Open Payments Platforms

Today's fraud management requires an end-to-end solution that touches all parts of the payments process.

Fraud orchestration within an open payments platform provides end-to-end protection.

In an increasingly complex payments environment, orchestration is about more than just connectivity; It's about intelligence. According to Spreedly's State of Checkout 2025, merchants managing multiple payment gateways face parallel challenges in fraud detection. Integrating fraud orchestration into an open payments platform allows enterprises to coordinate fraud rules and transaction routing simultaneously, maintaining a seamless experience without compromising protection. For Spreedly, combining payments and fraud orchestration means merchants can innovate faster, plug in the tools they trust, and orchestrate every transaction end-to-end (from risk decision to authorization) in a single open ecosystem.

51%

of global e-commerce merchants expect to spend Fraud Manager It will remain flat or decline in the near future.

The basic principle is that fraud orchestration is not just about the moment of transaction. Instead, it enables merchants to manage all risk moments leading up to a transaction, as well as post-transaction dispute and response management. The process must cover the entire payment process so that both merchants and their future customers are protected.

Fraud planning meets the growing need to do more with less.

Merchants are under increasing pressure to cut operating costs while combating more sophisticated fraud threats. The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) reports that minimizing fraud-related operational costs is a top priority, rising from 10% to 20% year over year, with 51% of merchants expecting anti-fraud staff spending to remain the same or decrease. At the same time, 63% of respondents plan to increase investment in fraud management technology, driving a structural shift from labor-intensive processes to automated, machine learning-driven workflows. Fraud orchestration helps bridge this gap: by consolidating data, reducing manual review, and enabling adaptive controls, it enables merchants to respond to changing threats with fewer resources while maintaining high fraud prevention accuracy.

Fraudulent activity doesn’t stop with transactions

Fraud orchestration represents the next step in smart payments. Enterprises that unify their payments and fraud strategies can reduce friction, accelerate innovation, and maintain trust at scale. In this section, PYMNTS Intelligence provides actionable insights into how an open payments platform with fraud orchestration capabilities can help organizations stay one step ahead in the fight against digital fraud.

PYMNTS Intelligence provides the following actionable roadmap for companies considering fraud orchestration solutions:

Be smart. Fraud planning involves both intelligence and prevention. Effective orchestration relies on a combination of multiple risk signals—such as behavioral patterns, device details, and transaction context—so fraud systems can make more accurate, real-time decisions.
Fight fire with fire. As technology evolves, fraudsters become more sophisticated; so must detection and prevention strategies. As fraudsters weaponize automation and generative tools, merchants must respond with adaptive, machine learning-driven controls that can identify new attack vectors in real time.
Been walking for a long time. Fraud planning doesn’t stop with transactions. It should touch every step of the payment process. Modern fraud tactics go beyond the moment of authorization by monitoring risks in onboarding, account changes, transaction flow, and post-purchase disputes.
Look both ways. Combining fraud orchestration with payment routing enables merchants to optimize authorization rates while minimizing unnecessary verification steps that lead to cart abandonment.

Businessmen today face more complex and elusive enemies than ever before. Rapidly evolving technological tools enable fraudsters to exploit vulnerabilities in payment channels in ever-evolving ways. To fight back, merchants need to think holistically about fraud management to coordinate and orchestrate their defenses.