From Fragmented to Fortified: Closing the Gaps in Your Fraud Strategy

David Kistler

In the battle against fraud, your institution’s greatest vulnerability isn’t always a sophisticated scam or an advanced piece of malware. Often it’s your own fragmented infrastructure.

In a recent Datos Insights study, 18 of 19 fraud prevention leaders at banks and credit unions pointed to the same primary challenge: critical customer data stuck in disconnected systems. Their fraud strategies aren’t failing for lack of tools, they’re failing because those tools can’t work together.

That single issue sets off a cascade of related challenges:

• 63% struggle with visibility across key channels—online, mobile, branch, and call center
• 58% report inadequate real-time detection capabilities
• 58% cite poor orchestration between fraud tools and controls
• 42% face integration issues between fraud and core banking systems

This is more than a technology gap—it’s a structural flaw. And fraudsters are using it to their advantage.

Is your fraud strategy built for today's threats?

Most financial institutions operate across multiple platforms—core systems, digital banking, payments, and more. Each has its own fraud tools and data models. This creates dangerous blind spots where fraudulent behavior goes undetected simply because no single system can see the complete picture.

Modern fraud moves at digital speed. While your systems are processing transactions in separate silos, fraudsters are exploiting the gaps between them. That suspicious login alert in your digital banking system? It may never connect with the large ACH transfer being processed through another channel until it's too late.

The "Frankenbank" problem

In the Datos report, one fraud leader summed up the reality perfectly, calling their institution a “Frankenbank” thanks to the messy mix of siloed systems stitched together. Over years of digital transformation, many institutions add point solutions to address emerging threats, but often without thinking about how they integrate across other systems. The result is a patchwork of tools that generate alerts but fail to communicate with each other or orchestrate a coordinated response.

Consider this common scenario:

• Your digital banking platform flags an unusual login attempt
• Meanwhile, your core system processes a large transfer, unaware of the risk
• Your customer calls about a strange transaction, but the contact center has no visibility into the earlier alerts from your digital platform
• By the time these dots are connected, the money is gone

Sound familiar? Many institutions still bridge these gaps with manual workarounds and exception lists—approaches that are costly, time-consuming, and increasingly ineffective against sophisticated fraud.

The strategic imperative

What makes this challenge so pressing right now?

• Nearly 60% of financial institutions recognize their real-time fraud detection is inadequate (per the Datos report)
• Cross-channel visibility ranks as the second biggest issue for fraud teams
• Fraudsters actively exploit these gaps, hopping between channels to avoid detection

These aren't just technical issues—they represent strategic vulnerabilities that impact your bottom line, customer trust, and operational efficiency.

Building a unified defense

The solution starts with breaking down data silos and embracing fraud orchestration platforms that can:

1. Unify disparate data sources across your technology ecosystem
2. Enable true cross-channel visibility for comprehensive risk assessment
3. Support real-time decisioning to match the speed of modern transactions
4. Orchestrate coordinated responses rather than isolated alerts

The most effective orchestration solutions connect signals from across your tech stack, apply sophisticated analytics in milliseconds, and help you respond with exactly the right action—whether that's stepping up authentication, blocking a transaction, or notifying your team.

A path forward

If your fraud prevention still relies on disconnected systems and manual processes, you're not alone—but you're also increasingly vulnerable.

The financial institutions seeing the greatest success are those taking a strategic approach to integration and orchestration. They're breaking down silos not just within fraud teams, but across risk, compliance, and customer experience functions.

The message is clear: In today's fraud landscape, integration isn't just a technical goal—it's a business imperative. The time to fortify your fragmented defenses is now, before fraudsters exploit the gaps.