The following post is provided by Socure, a MeridianLink® Marketplace partner.
Here is a number that should unsettle every fraud leader at a community financial institution: According to a 2026 industry benchmark study of more than 500 fraud decision-makers, 72% of credit unions now report that fraud events are increasing. For regional and community banks, the figure is 71%. That represents a roughly 20-point jump from the prior year.
Let that sink in. Not a gradual creep. A 20-point escalation in twelve months.
And the financial damage is not abstract. 100% of the study’s participating credit unions—yes, every single one of them—reported fraud losses exceeding $250,000 in the past year. Meanwhile, a combined 52% of community and regional banks reported losses above $5 million. These are not numbers that belong on someone else’s balance sheet. They belong on yours.
Exacerbating this challenge is the fact that tools simply weren’t built for the modern fraud era.
Most community financial institutions did not arrive at this moment because they ignored fraud. They arrived here because they invested in the right tools for a different era. An identity check at onboarding. A transaction monitoring system. A watchlist screening tool. A separate vendor for device verification. Each one addressed a real need. Each one solved a specific moment.
But fraud prevention is no longer a moment. It is a lifecycle.
The same industry study found that synthetic identity fraud is now the number one fraud type by case volume, followed closely by account takeover and authorized push payment fraud. These are not isolated attacks. They are coordinated campaigns that span onboarding, account usage, and transaction activity. A synthetic identity does not fail at one checkpoint. It passes your onboarding verification, builds a thin credit history, and then detonates months later when the loss gets written off as bad debt. Your point-in-time tool caught nothing because it was only looking at one point in time.
Meanwhile, 91% of decision-makers in the study say they are seeing more financial crimes committed with AI technology. The attacks are not just more frequent. They are more sophisticated, harder to detect with rules-based systems, and specifically designed to exploit the blind spots between your disconnected tools.
Fraud is a loss problem and a growth problem.
Here is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. The same study found that 94% of decision-makers say fraud risk is the primary factor when deciding what new products to offer customers. 98% of credit unions specifically agreed with that statement.
Think about what that means. The institutions most focused on serving their members are also the most constrained by fraud when it comes to launching new products, expanding into real-time payments, or extending offers to higher-risk customer segments. Fraud is not just taking money off your balance sheet. It is keeping opportunity off the table.
And the organizations that figure this out stand to gain significantly. 92% of decision-makers in the study said their fraud prevention efforts have directly contributed to business growth. The link between controlling risk and enabling growth is no longer theoretical. It is being measured, reported, and acted on by leaders across the industry.
Here’s what the leaders are doing differently.
The institutions that are pulling ahead share a common thread: They have stopped treating fraud as a collection of point problems and started treating it as a lifecycle challenge. Instead of maintaining five or six disconnected tools that each guard a single moment, they are moving toward unified, identity-driven platforms that span onboarding, account usage, transaction activity, and ongoing monitoring.
This shift changes everything. When your onboarding signals inform your transaction monitoring, and your transaction patterns feed back into your identity graph, you are catching fraud faster and earlier, often before a loss occurs. Proactive alerts replace reactive investigations. Continuous learning replaces static rules. And the same intelligence that stops bad actors also helps you confidently approve good customers, which means quicker onboarding, fewer false positives, and higher auto-approval rates.
The result is a fraud prevention strategy that protects the institution and powers its growth.
Continuing the conversation at MeridianLink LIVE!
At MeridianLink® LIVE! 2026, Socure will be exploring this shift in detail during a keynote session titled From products to solutions: Rethinking fraud and risk across the customer lifecycle. We will look at why point-in-time fraud products fail against modern identity-driven threats, how lifecycle-based risk solutions reduce complexity while improving outcomes, and what it looks like in practice when an enterprise identity graph enables community financial institutions to move from defensive fraud prevention to confident growth.
If you are responsible for fraud, risk, compliance, or growth strategy at a community financial institution, this is a conversation worth being part of. We look forward to seeing you in San Diego.
