According to PYMNTS.com, the scale of the fraud prevention problem is staggering, with an estimated $50 billion in legitimate revenue lost industrywide due to false declines. A Riskified survey found 85% of merchants say their top challenge is preventing fraud without hurting customer experience, and 47% estimate up to 5% of good orders are wrongly flagged. Spreedly’s 2025 State of Checkout Report adds that 36% of merchants have added redundant tools due to provider outages, and many manage five or more payment integrations, creating a fragmented mess. To combat this, fraud orchestration platforms are emerging as a command layer, with 53% of U.S. financial institutions already using them. Companies like Spreedly, which acquired Dodgeball for this purpose, and leaders profiled by Datos Insights such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions and ACI Worldwide, are building systems that unify risk signals, AI scoring, and verification into millisecond-level decisions.
The Friction & Failure Trap
Here’s the thing: for years, the advice was to just add another fraud tool. See a new threat? Bolt on another vendor. The result is exactly what Spreedly’s data shows—a chaotic stack of five or more integrations that don’t talk to each other. It’s a classic case of the cure becoming part of the disease. You get redundant checks, conflicting signals, and a ton of operational overhead. And the customer feels it all as friction. A false decline isn’t just a lost sale; it’s often a lost customer for good. So merchants have been stuck in this awful trap: add more tools to stop fraud, but in doing so, you create more points of failure and more reasons for good customers to abandon cart. It’s unsustainable.
Orchestration vs. The Siloed Mindset
So what does “orchestration” actually mean? It’s not just another tool. Think of it as the conductor for your entire fraud-prevention orchestra. Instead of every violin and trumpet playing its own tune, the conductor—the orchestration platform—decides which instrument plays, when, and how loud. In practice, this means using a central system to sequence checks. Is this a returning customer on a known device? Maybe skip the heavy identity verification. Is it a high-value transaction from a new IP address? Okay, now layer in the behavioral biometrics and machine learning scoring. The goal is to apply friction intelligently, only where risk justifies it. This is the shift from a siloed, “always-on” defense to a dynamic, adaptive one. It’s what lets you actually balance security and experience.
The Practical Push and Hidden Hurdles
Now, the momentum is real. When over half of U.S. FIs are already on board, you know this is moving past early adopter phase. The driver isn’t just fraud; it’s cold, hard efficiency. The Merchant Risk Council notes that 51% of merchants expect fraud-staff spending to stay flat or drop, while 63% plan to increase tech investment. Translation: they need to do more with less. Orchestration promises to automate manual reviews and consolidate vendor management. But let’s be skeptical for a second. Implementing a whole new command layer isn’t trivial. You’re talking about integrating all those existing point solutions into a new platform, which is its own technical headache. And you’re now placing immense trust in the logic and algorithms of the orchestration engine itself. Get those decision flows wrong, and you could *increase* risk or friction.
Beyond The Transaction
The most interesting insight, though, is how this thinking expands the battlefield. True fraud orchestration isn’t just about the millisecond of the payment. It’s about the entire journey—onboarding, monitoring, post-transaction disputes. It’s a lifecycle approach, like what Zoot Solutions is modeling. This is crucial because fraudsters exploit gaps *between* systems. If your sign-up process is weak, but your payment auth is strong, they’ll just take over accounts. Orchestration aims to close those gaps by providing cross-channel visibility. Basically, it’s the recognition that fraud management can’t be a department anymore; it has to be a woven-in, systemic function. For merchants drowning in tools and false declines, that unified view might finally be the path to reclaiming that $50 billion.
