Banks Win When They Connect Risk Signals Across the Life Cycle

Speed is becoming the name of the game across financial services, FinTech and digital commerce.

However, behind faster onboarding, faster payments and faster approvals hides a lurking threat. As fraud networks grow more sophisticated and digital ecosystems become more interconnected, velocity without visibility is turning into a liability.

“I think the word that will frame 2026 is fragmented risk systems,” Trulioo CEO Vicky Bindra told PYMNTS during a conversation for the February edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “Word of the Year.”

The fragmentation of existing risk systems is not merely a technical inefficiency; it’s a strategic exposure. As fraudsters orchestrate attacks across channels, geographies and identities, organizations must respond with equally coordinated defenses.

“The inability to manage data across your entire platform in a way that if a single bad actor comes into one place, a business either can’t stop them or can’t reduce the hemorrhage across other platforms, that is going to define risk in 2026,” Bindra said.

His diagnosis points to a structural flaw in how most organizations build their digital infrastructure. Identity verification, transaction monitoring, vendor screening and compliance checks have traditionally often been deployed incrementally, layered on as discrete solutions to specific regulatory or operational needs.

The result can be a patchwork of tools that may excel individually but rarely communicate effectively with one another, leaving space in between them for fraudsters to take advantage.

From Checkpoint Security to Lifecycle Intelligence

Identity across financial services, payments and commerce is no longer static. It’s contextual, behavioral and temporal. In a world where a verified identity at 9 a.m. can become a compromised one by noon, continuous validation, rather than one-time authentication, is becoming the new baseline.

Bindra described this as a shift away from a checkpoint mentality toward what he called a lifecycle approach to trust, adding that signals collected during onboarding, such as device fingerprints, behavioral data, location indicators and more, should not be discarded once an account is opened.

“For example, when onboarding a customer, you take telephone signals to understand whether the customer is the right customer using the right device,” he said. “There is no reason not to use those device signals, which are a great passive way of managing risk, across the platform and across the lifecycle.”

The simple fact that fraud itself is rarely a single event is also having a broader impact across the identity verification market itself, which is evolving in-step with today’s fraud realities to expand into broader and more dynamic questions of intent, legitimacy and financial trustworthiness.

“What we want is to help businesses answer the question, ‘Is this truly our customer who is interacting with us and whom we are managing day to day?’” Bindra said.

Synthetic identities, account takeovers and mule networks can blur the line between authentication and behavioral analysis. Companies are increasingly being asked not just to validate identities but to interpret the patterns capable of distinguishing legitimate anomalies from malicious ones in real time.

Data Integrity as the New Battleground

If fragmented systems are the structural problem, data integrity is the operational one. Risk models are only as strong as the information feeding them, and the rapid expansion of data sources has created opportunity and vulnerability.

“What keeps us up at night is the integrity of data,” Bindra said. “To ensure that data is completely robust and make sure all of our fraud and risk signals are working to the best ability.”

Organizations increasingly resemble data stewards as much as technology providers, he said. Maintaining freshness, accuracy and interoperability across datasets is not a back-office function; it’s mission-critical infrastructure.

Against that backdrop, it’s becoming critical for firms to view risk controls less as constraints and more as enablers of sustainable scale.

“Onboarding and ongoing friction can be completely valid,” Bindra said, adding that the companies that succeed in digital markets are not those that eliminate friction entirely, but those that deploy it precisely.

“Risk controls represent good friction, helping enhance the number of customers you can onboard,” he added.

While blanket verifications can slow growth and frustrate legitimate users, targeted intervention may improve approval rates while filtering out risk. Consider a scenario where address data or behavioral signals don’t align, and red flags have been raised. Asking a customer for additional documentation, whether a driver’s license or selfie verification, may introduce extra steps, but it can strengthen security and data quality.

The winners of 2026 may not be those that eliminate risk, but those that understand it holistically by linking signals, contexts and decisions into a continuous narrative of identity, Bindra said. The challenge for businesses is simple in concept but sophisticated in execution. They must solve for fragmentation before the attackers solve it first.