Fraud Orchestration Puts Merchants Back in Charge

Merchants typically treated it as a tax on growth, something to be minimized rather than mastered. Risk decisions were outsourced to payment processors and banks, accepted as black-box outcomes that merchants absorbed with little recourse. When transactions failed, revenue disappeared quietly. When fraud rose, costs followed.

But findings in the December 2025 edition of the Payments Orchestration Tracker® Series, a PYMNTS Intelligence and Spreedly collaboration, reveal that model no longer holds. As fraud becomes more adaptive and digital commerce more fragmented, merchants are discovering that fraud prevention is no longer just about stopping bad actors. It is about owning the logic of trust.

And in an economy where trust determines who can transact, how smoothly, and at what scale, ownership is becoming a competitive differentiator.

Old Fraud Model Is Breaking Down

The traditional approach to fraud prevention was built for a simpler era. Card-not-present transactions dominated, attack patterns were relatively static, and rules-based systems could keep pace. Merchants leaned on their payment service providers’ default risk settings, layering in point solutions only when losses spiked.

Today’s fraud landscape looks nothing like that. Bots test login flows at scale. Synthetic identities bypass onboarding checks. Account takeovers unfold across devices and channels. Disputes increasingly reflect customer confusion or buyer’s remorse rather than criminal intent. Fraud is no longer a single event at checkout — it is a life cycle problem.

At the same time, customer expectations have hardened. Shoppers expect instant approvals and minimal friction, regardless of channel or payment method. Merchants are caught in the middle, accountable for both fraud losses and customer experience, but with limited control over how risk decisions are made.

Fraud orchestration offers merchants a way out of this bind. Rather than relying on isolated tools and processor-defined logic, orchestration introduces a centralized decision layer that sits above fraud vendors and payment gateways. It connects identity signals, behavioral data, device intelligence, and transaction context into a single system that determines how risk is assessed and acted upon.

Read the report: Orchestrating Trust: The Future of Fraud Prevention in Payments

The technology itself is not revolutionary. What is new is the shift in control. Orchestration allows merchants to define their own risk strategies, test different approaches, and adapt in real time. Instead of inheriting declines from upstream providers, merchants can decide when to trust, when to challenge, and when to say no.

Merchants moving toward orchestration typically start by decoupling fraud decisioning from any single provider. Instead of allowing a processor’s model to dictate outcomes, they introduce an abstraction layer that can route transactions, sequence checks and apply rules dynamically.

This shifts merchants from being downstream recipients of risk decisions to active architects of trust — positioning them to scale faster, negotiate better with providers, and adapt quickly as payments, regulation and fraud tactics continue to evolve.

From Fraud Prevention to Trust Management

The most forward-looking merchants are using orchestration to reframe fraud altogether. The goal is no longer simply to block bad transactions, but to manage trust dynamically across the customer life cycle.

In practice, this means treating trust as something that can be earned and reinforced over time. Known customers with consistent behavior encounter less friction. New or anomalous behavior triggers additional verification. The system adapts as customers interact more frequently, creating smoother experiences without sacrificing security.

This approach recognizes a fundamental reality of digital commerce: Trust is contextual. A customer may be low risk in one scenario and higher risk in another. Static rules cannot capture that nuance. Orchestration can.

Merchants can adapt decision flows to regional regulations, insert human review where required, and demonstrate governance over risk decisions. This is more important as trust becomes not just a technical issue, but a reputational and regulatory one.

Fraud orchestration is not a silver bullet. But for merchants willing to invest, it represents a shift from being downstream recipients of risk decisions to active architects of trust. In the years ahead, that distinction may define the leaders of digital commerce.