NEW YORK--Trust in financial services can no longer be treated as a one-time checkpoint at account opening, as fraudsters increasingly exploit digital channels, according to a new PYMNTS report based on interviews with executives from Mastercard and Trulioo.
PYMNTS reported that financial institutions and fintechs are being pushed to move beyond static know-your-customer reviews and toward continuous, risk-based trust models that span onboarding, authentication and payments.
“Gone are the days where trust was treated like a binary gate at the point of account opening. Trust was an event; now, it’s a profile,” Kiran Kumar, vice president of product at Trulioo, told PYMNTS. The report said that shift is being driven by rising fraud, account takeovers and increasingly sophisticated synthetic identities that can pass initial checks and build credibility over time before striking.
PYMNTS said one of the biggest operational challenges is that many institutions still keep identity, authentication and fraud data in separate systems, limiting their ability to connect risk signals across the customer lifecycle.
“Every interaction is a valuable piece of information, and you want to be able to store it, flag it, share it across your organization,” Kurt Weiss, vice president of product at Mastercard, told PYMNTS.
Weiss added that when signals remain siloed, institutions lose the ability to recognize that “the person who came in door A is the same as the person who came in door B.”
That challenge is becoming more urgent as synthetic identities become more scalable and harder to spot, the report said. PYMNTS said these AI-enhanced fake personas are built from a mix of real and fabricated data and are designed to survive early verification checks. Kumar told PYMNTS that detecting them increasingly requires “verification as interrogation,” a deeper, context-based approach that goes beyond surface-level validation.
Both executives told PYMNTS that stronger fraud defenses depend on better orchestration of behavioral, device, transactional and digital-footprint signals into a single, dynamic view of the customer.
“It’s about orchestration of these signals and creating context to that entity,” Kumar said, adding the real question is whether a customer remains consistent over time and whether their risk posture has changed.
Weiss said many firms still struggle to turn those signals into real-time action, asking, “Could you actually deliver a risk score there? Could you action on that?”
PYMNTS reported that the broader shift is reframing trust from a pure compliance or fraud-control issue into a business and customer-experience issue as well. Weiss said financial institutions are increasingly designing onboarding and verification experiences that evolve as relationships deepen, while Kumar summarized the new approach this way: “Trust is really relational. It’s not transactional.”