Orchestrating Trust: The Future of Fraud Prevention in Payments

Fraud prevention is no longer a single tool or team; it’s a coordinated ecosystem. As digital transactions scale and fraud tactics evolve, fraud orchestration has emerged as the missing layer connecting risk signals, verification systems and payment gateways. This Tracker explores how fraud orchestration turns fragmented defenses into unified, intelligent protection.

• What Fraud Orchestration Is and Why It Matters
• From Fragmented to Unified Security: Fraud Orchestration in Action
• Why Fraud Orchestration Belongs in an Open Payments Platform
• Fraud Orchestration Doesn’t Stop With the Transaction

[branded_divider]

What Fraud Orchestration Is and Why It Matters

Merchants must balance fraud prevention with minimizing payment friction that can stop legitimate customers from buying. Fraud orchestration helps achieve this balance.

Fraud prevention today requires a multilayered approach.

Spreedly notes that the growing complexity of digital payments has created equally complex attack surfaces, turning static tools into blind spots against adaptive threats. As payments technology evolves, fraudsters’ tactics evolve with it. Fraudsters simultaneously deploy bots, account takeovers, synthetic identities and friendly-fraud tactics, shifting vectors as soon as merchants close one gap. Legacy rules engines catch familiar patterns yet miss novel signals. Moreover, while machine learning (ML) models 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 in 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 deeply interconnected—gaps in one layer can lead to friction, false declines or lost conversions in another. Fraud orchestration helps safeguard revenue by ensuring that risk checks, identity verification and payment routing work in concert rather than in isolation.

In short, fraud has grown too dynamic and sophisticated for single-layer defenses to keep pace. Fraud orchestration has emerged to unify these layers, ensuring that risk decisions evolve as fast as the threats they counter.

Effective fraud fighting cannot come at the expense of customer experience.

Despite these rising threats, merchants are under pressure to strike the right balance between friction and protection. According to a Riskified survey, 85% of merchants say their top challenge is preventing fraud without degrading the customer experience. Nearly half (47%) estimate that up to 5% of legitimate customer orders are wrongly declined as fraudulent—amounting to an estimated $50 billion in lost revenue industrywide.

Spreedly’s 2025 State of Checkout Report confirms that false flags remain a leading cause of checkout failure for some merchants, while 36% have added redundant fraud tools to counter provider outages. With merchants often managing five or more payment integrations, fragmentation itself becomes a source of friction—making orchestration essential.

Orchestration optimizes multiple objectives simultaneously.

Fraud orchestration removes the trade-off between security and customer experience by consolidating risk signals and decisioning into a unified, adaptive workflow. Instead of relying on siloed vendors, orchestration blends identity verification, behavioral analytics, device intelligence and transactional risk scoring into a real-time assessment engine.

Research shows that multilayered, AI-driven fraud controls can reduce false positives and improve decision accuracy, while advanced fraud-management approaches also support higher transaction-approval rates by reducing unnecessary declines. These capabilities offer a critical advantage as instant payments and embedded commerce compress decision windows. By routing transactions through the optimal checks—heightening scrutiny only when risk justifies it—fraud orchestration protects revenue, streamlines checkout and preserves customer trust across every channel.

[branded_divider]

From Fragmented to Unified Security: Fraud Orchestration in Action

Fraud orchestration is the command-and-control platform that lets organizations integrate multiple components into a single system.

Orchestration removes the need for redundancy in fraud-prevention strategies.

53%

of FIs say they already use a fraud-orchestration solution or expect to adopt one soon.

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

Fraud orchestration thus reframes defense from a patchwork of tools into a coordinated, intelligent system. Spreedly describes it as sequencing risk checks like an air-traffic controller: Each tool contributes its strengths, but orchestration determines the right order and conditions for use. This prevents over-verification of trusted customers while tightening controls on suspicious traffic. Layered defenses incorporating behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting, rules engines and ML scoring reduce fraud losses and minimize false positives. Operational efficiency also improves: Central orchestration reduces the burden of managing multiple integrations, accelerates iteration of fraud strategies and enables targeted use of cost-effective vendors across use cases.

Implementation of fraud orchestration is rising accordingly.

With fraud escalating across channels, more organizations are turning to orchestration to unify detection, reduce manual overhead and accelerate strategic responsiveness. Datos Insights reports that 53% of United States financial institutions (FIs) already use fraud orchestration, 16% are implementing it and 26% plan to adopt it. It notes that orchestration platforms integrate application programming interfaces (APIs), third-party signals, internal data and ML-based scoring engines into a single decision layer capable of millisecond-level assessments. These systems also enable A/B testing of tools, centralized rule deployment, unified case management and cross-channel visibility—capabilities essential as fraudsters exploit gaps between payment flows. The result is a more agile, data-driven and scalable fraud posture.

A few key examples showcase these solutions.

Spreedly’s acquisition of Dodgeball embeds fraud orchestration directly into its open payments stack, enabling merchants to design and deploy branching fraud workflows visually without 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 profiled both LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ACI Worldwide as leading providers in the fraud orchestration market, delivering real-time risk decisioning and flexible deployment options across large-scale environments. Meanwhile, Zoot Solutions’ life-cycle-wide orchestration model—spanning onboarding, monitoring and decisioning—further demonstrates how orchestration is becoming a unifying layer for adaptive, enterprise risk control.

[branded_divider]

Why Fraud Orchestration Belongs in an Open Payments Platform

Fraud management today requires an end-to-end solution that touches all parts of the payment journey.

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

In an increasingly complex payments landscape, orchestration is not just about 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 businesses to coordinate fraud rules and transaction routing simultaneously, maintaining seamless experiences 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 decisioning to authorization—within a single, open ecosystem.

51%

of global eCommerce merchants expect spending for fraud-management staff to remain flat or decline in the near future.

The underlying principle is that fraud orchestration does not focus only on the moment of transaction. Rather, it gives merchants the ability to manage all the moments of risk that lead up to the transaction, as well as post-transaction dispute and response management. The process must span the entire payments journey so that both the merchant and its future customers are protected.

Fraud orchestration meets the growing imperative to do more with less.

Merchants face increasing pressure to cut operational costs while managing more complex fraud threats. The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) reports that minimizing fraud-related operating costs has doubled as a top priority, rising from 10% to 20% of merchants year over year, and 51% expect fraud-staff spending to remain flat or decline. Meanwhile, 63% plan to increase investment in fraud-management technologies—driving a structural shift from labor-intensive processes to automated, ML-powered workflows. Fraud orchestration helps bridge this gap: By consolidating data, reducing manual reviews and enabling adaptive controls, it empowers merchants to counter evolving threats with fewer resources while maintaining high fraud-prevention accuracy.

[branded_divider]

Fraud Orchestration Doesn’t Stop With the Transaction

Fraud orchestration represents the next evolution of intelligent payments. Businesses that unify their payments and fraud strategies can reduce friction, accelerate innovation and preserve trust at scale. In this section, PYMNTS Intelligence will provide actionable insights on how open payments platforms with fraud orchestration capabilities can help organizations stay one step ahead in the fight against digital fraud.

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

• Be smart. Fraud orchestration is about intelligence as much as prevention. Effective orchestration depends on combining 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. Fraudsters are growing more sophisticated as technology evolves; so must detection and prevention strategies. As fraudsters weaponize automation and generative tools, merchants must counter with adaptive, ML-powered controls capable of identifying new attack vectors in real time.
• Go long. Fraud orchestration doesn’t stop at the transaction. It should touch every step in the payment journey. A modern fraud strategy extends beyond the authorization moment by monitoring risk across onboarding, account changes, transaction flows and post-purchase disputes.
• See both sides. Integrating fraud orchestration with payments routing enables merchants to optimize authorization rates while minimizing unnecessary verification steps that drive cart abandonment.

Merchants today face a more sophisticated and elusive foe than ever before. Rapidly evolving technology tools enable fraudsters to exploit gaps in payment channels in ever-evolving ways. To fight back, merchants need to think about fraud management holistically to coordinate and orchestrate their defenses.

Fraud is evolving too quickly for merchants to rely on one tool or one approach. Fraud orchestration brings those signals and decisions together so teams can protect revenue without adding friction. At Spreedly, we’re focused on giving merchants the flexibility to adapt fast and stay ahead as the threat landscape shifts.”

Adam Hiatt
Vice President, Fraud Strategy, Spreedly

The post Orchestrating Trust: The Future of Fraud Prevention in Payments appeared first on PYMNTS.com.