JPMorgan and ACI Team to Combat Real-Time Payment Fraud

The collaboration, announced Friday (April 24), will see JPMorgan integrate its Kinexys Liink’s Confirm application into ACI Worldwide’s Fraud and Financial Crime solution. 

According to an ACI news release, the integration embeds account and payee verification right into payment workflows, allowing banks to help prevent fraud, protect customers, and support safer, faster payments at scale.

With this collaboration, financial institutions (FIs) get a “robust account validation capability, supporting a broad range of payment types and geographies,” the release added. 

“By unifying account and payee verification within an enterprise fraud platform, banks can apply consistent controls across payment rails, simplify compliance with evolving requirements, and strengthen protection as payment volumes continue to grow.”

Unlike traditional payments, transactions sent via instant rails are irreversible, the release continued. Once funds have been transmitted, they can’t be recalled, leaving institutions with no recovery window and making post‑transaction monitoring insufficient by itself.

As fraud volumes keep climbing, there is a rising call across the industry for more robust account/payee verification for certain payments. The focus is increasingly on authenticating payment details upfront, so institutions can identify fraud before funds leave the account.

“At the same time, heightened consumer awareness, higher reimbursement pressures, and increased operational risk are leading banks to embed stronger verification controls directly into the payment flow as a standard feature of modern payments infrastructure,” the release added.

Despite fraud concerns around instant payments, legacy payment methods such as checks remain a leading source of fraud risk, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

Checks are 16 times more likely to be lost, stolen or altered compared to electronic transfers, according to U.S. government data, while more than 50% of the businesses that suffered fraud last year still use checks. 

“Despite this, many organizations continue to view checks as safer than instant payment methods because of their physical nature, even as evidence suggests greater fraud exposure,” that report added.

By contrast, real-time payment rails are showing stronger security performance. Many institutions using instant payments say they’ve seen limited or no operational fraud impact, supported by ongoing monitoring, transaction-level visibility and quicker detection. As experience grows, perceptions are changing, with 37% of businesses pointing to security as a top benefit of embracing instant payments. This figure is up from 25% one year earlier.

“Still, confidence depends on readiness. FIs increasingly view fraud-prevention tools as essential to scaling instant payments,” PYMNTS added. “This view underscores the need to invest in monitoring, governance and exception handling as volumes grow.”