Money20/20 2026: When Fraud Looks Like a Real Customer

Fintech has spent years removing friction from financial services.

Opening an account, sending money, applying for credit, investing, or making a payment can now happen in seconds. The industry has automated decisions that once required paperwork, phone calls, and human review, and built much better experiences in the process. The power of blockchain technologies that power cryptocurrencies and stablecoin have pushed this automation even further, making cross-border transactions faster and easier. (While also introducing new volatility, in the case of crypto!) 

Fraudsters have benefited from the same technological progress,

AI and automation make attacks easier to scale. Synthetic identities and infrastructure spoofing make verification harder. Residential proxies and compromised consumer devices allow fraudulent activity to arrive through infrastructure that looks identical to that of a legitimate customer. 

And they don’t have regulatory overhead or institutional responsibility tempering access.

These are challenges we’re already hearing about from our customers building the infrastructure and software platforms behind financial interactions and transactions. They’re trying to catch more sophisticated fraud while reducing false positives, protecting conversion, and proving that the growing fraud stack is actually delivering value.

Next week I'll be at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas with the IPinfo team. I'm keen to hear how banks, payment platforms, identity providers, fraud vendors, lenders, and other fintech companies are responding.

Because as fraud gets harder to distinguish from legitimate activity, simply adding more friction isn't a sustainable answer. We need to be able to see it coming. 

Better Fraud Decisions Need Better Context

One of the problems our fintech customers are bringing to us is how to identify fraud earlier in the supply chain, before it reaches the infrastructure responsible for identity, payments, and transactions. And how to do that without catching more legitimate customers along with it.

That’s becoming harder as traditional identity checks lose effectiveness and increasing check volumes drive up costs.

IP context provides an earlier layer of defense. It gives teams evidence about where and how a request originates before it reaches more expensive verification checks or critical financial infrastructure.

For the fintech companies integrating our data into their products, the goal is to add a layer of defense that works earlier and at scale, giving them greater certainty about the traffic they’re seeing before more expensive checks begin. Clearer cases can be handled sooner, leaving fraud teams and verification systems to concentrate on the activity that genuinely requires additional scrutiny.

We’re already seeing this approach used by fraud platforms, identity providers, payment companies, and KYC and AML providers. IP intelligence can sit directly inside their products, adding infrastructure context from account creation and login through payments and ongoing verification.

That matters as verification becomes continuous. No single signal carries the decision. What matters is whether the evidence continues to add up as a customer moves through the financial system.

See You in Las Vegas

We'll be at Booth 16106 at The Venetian from October 18 to 21, giving live demonstrations of our data and talking about payment fraud, KYC and compliance, VPN and residential proxy detection, geolocation, and how IP intelligence can be embedded directly into fintech products.

If you're attending, come and tell us where your fraud stack is struggling. We already know from our customers that false positives, increasingly convincing fraudulent traffic, and demonstrating ROI are difficult problems. I want to hear how they're showing up in your environment and where your current signals leave gaps.