Fraud prevention has usually been measured by what it stops. Elavon, the payments platform owned by U.S. Bank, argues the more revealing number sits on the other side of the ledger: how many genuine customers were challenged, delayed or declined by the controls meant to protect them.
The Fintech Times put six written questions to Candice Pressinger, director of customer data security at Elavon, on account takeover, money mule networks, authorised push payment scams that begin outside a provider’s perimeter, phone-based intervention, and how far the fraud picture varies from one European market to the next.
1. You argue fraud prevention has moved from a compliance obligation to a competitive differentiator built on trust. What changed?
The conversation has shifted from, “How much fraud did we stop?” to, “How many genuine customers did we inconvenience along the way?”
Fraud is still a financial risk, but it has become a customer confidence issue as well. UK Finance reported that criminals stole £629.3 million through fraud in the first half of 2025 across more than two million confirmed cases. Those numbers matter, but so does how customers experience the controls designed to protect them.
Customers expect providers to keep them safe. They also expect payments to work quickly and without unnecessary interruption. If a provider cannot protect them, confidence falls. If a genuine payment is repeatedly challenged, confidence falls there too. A customer whose card is declined while travelling, or whose regular spending is repeatedly flagged as suspicious, will quickly lose confidence in the service, even if those controls were intended to protect them.
Compliance remains the starting point. The difference between providers increasingly comes down to who can reduce fraud without making everyday payments harder than they need to be.
2. Why does account takeover erode customer trust faster than almost any other fraud type, and what does continuous rather than episodic authentication look like in practice?
Account takeover undermines confidence because customers stop asking whether a transaction was fraudulent and start asking whether their account is secure at all.
A disputed payment is serious but having someone gain access to your account feels far more personal. Customers begin to question whether their credentials, personal information and account history are protected.
The financial impact can often be resolved. Rebuilding confidence takes much longer. That is why authentication can no longer be treated as a single event. A successful login only tells you something about that moment in time. Risk can change during the session.
Continuous authentication means monitoring how risk changes throughout the customer journey, not just at login or payment authorisation. The aim is not to introduce more checks. It is to identify when risk changes and respond accordingly, while allowing genuine customers to continue with minimal disruption.
3. Money mule accounts look entirely legitimate in isolation. If single-institution thinking cannot solve a network problem, what can?
Criminals operate across networks, but much of the industry still tries to tackle fraud organisation by organisation.
Money mule activity is a good example. A mule account can appear entirely legitimate on its own. It may belong to a real person, pass onboarding checks and behave normally until it becomes part of a wider pattern of criminal activity.
Europol’s European Money Mule Action continues to demonstrate the scale of the problem, with thousands of mules identified through coordinated industry efforts. What matters is not simply the volume. It is the fact that no single institution can see the full picture.
The answer is better intelligence across the ecosystem, bringing together onboarding data, device information, behavioural signals and transaction activity.
Real-time payments require real-time visibility. Otherwise, individual firms are being asked to identify behaviour that only becomes obvious when a broader industry view is available.
4. Two-thirds of authorised push payment scams begin on tech platforms. What can payment providers actually do about fraud that starts outside their perimeter?
Fraud does not care where organisational boundaries sit, and customers should not have to either.
In many APP scams, the payment is the final stage of the fraud rather than the first. The manipulation may have started days or weeks earlier through a fake advert, an impersonation attempt, a marketplace listing or a social media conversation.
Payment providers can still play an important role. They can strengthen behavioural monitoring, identify unusual payment patterns, improve customer warning journeys and respond more quickly to high-risk beneficiaries.
However, we also need to be realistic about where intervention opportunities exist. If a customer is being manipulated before they reach the payment stage, prevention needs to start there as well.
The strongest response comes from shared accountability, better information sharing and closer collaboration between platforms, banks and payment providers.
5. Why does phone-based fraud intervention remain among the most effective controls in an increasingly digital stack?
The most effective fraud control is sometimes a conversation.
Many scams succeed because of manipulation rather than technical compromise. Analytics
can identify unusual behaviour, but they cannot always recognise pressure, urgency or
coaching in the same way an experienced fraud specialist can.
In authorised push payment scams particularly, that human judgement can be critical. Customers may genuinely believe they are doing the right thing because they have been convinced by a fraudster’s story.
A well-timed conversation can create the pause needed for someone to stop, reconsider and ask the right questions.
UK Finance has highlighted the impact of the Banking Protocol, which has prevented more than £400 million from being stolen. That reinforces an important point: phone intervention is not a legacy control. It is a targeted intervention used where human judgement is most likely to change the outcome.
The challenge is applying it efficiently. No provider can contact every customer about every unusual payment. Technology should help identify the small number of cases where a conversation is most likely to prevent harm.
6. How does the fraud picture vary across Europe, and what should providers operating in multiple markets take from that?
Fraud may be global, but customer behaviour is not.
Providers operating across Europe often make the mistake of assuming that a control which works well in one market will deliver the same results everywhere else. In reality, payment behaviours, regulatory frameworks and fraud typologies vary significantly between countries.
Recent EBA and ECB reporting shows fraud rates remain higher where strong customer authentication requirements do not apply. That is important, but the wider lesson is that fraud controls need to reflect how customers pay, how criminals operate and how risk presents itself in each market.
Strong authentication remains important, but increasingly the challenge is not whether a customer can authenticate themselves. It is whether they are being manipulated into authorising a payment that benefits a fraudster.
The providers seeing the best results combine local market understanding with a connected view of risk across their wider network. Consistency matters. Uniformity does not.
The post Elavon: Fraud Controls are Now Judged by the Customers They Stop appeared first on The Fintech Times.
