Traditional fraud defenses are crumbling under industrialized AI attacks. A recent webinar featuring Coast's CFO Anurag Puranik and Oscilar's CPO Saurabh Bajaj revealed the stark reality: fraudsters now generate pre-verified account forms, clone voices in 5 seconds, bypass liveness checks with injection attacks, and deploy agentic bots that mimic human behavior patterns at scale.

Coast - a corporate card provider serving small trade businesses - experienced this firsthand. After 12 pristine months, they lost significant money within 48 hours when fraudsters exploited their selfie verification system. The breach exposed a critical infrastructure problem: their fraud detection tools operated in silos.

While identity verification, document tampering checks, and digital footprint analysis ran separately, Coast's operations team trained analysts on evolving threats but fell into "inertia," losing touch with emerging patterns. Meanwhile, their barcode verification - once crucial for matching front IDs to backup barcodes - became trivial to defeat with ChatGPT scripts that generate matching codes. When fraudsters called customer service, they used AI-generated scripts providing perfect line-by-line responses about vehicle counts and spending patterns. The fragmented systems couldn't connect these signals fast enough.

This perfectly illustrates that the solution requires unified risk orchestration platforms (i.e. like Oscilar) connecting data across entire customer journeys. These platforms combine dynamic data orchestration, workflow-based risk journeys adapting in real-time, portfolios of traditional and transformer-based models, and natural language interfaces eliminating cryptic vendor languages.

TL;DR

• Financial institutions face an urgent threat as fraudsters deploy industrialized AI attacks that generate fake documents, clone voices in seconds, and bypass traditional verification systems at scale.

• The fundamental problem lies in fragmented detection systems operating in silos, as demonstrated by Coast's experience losing significant funds within 48 hours despite 12 pristine months.

• The solution requires unified risk orchestration platforms combined with agentic AI applications that conduct automatic 360-degree reviews, provide co-pilots trained on historical fraud patterns, and continuously recommend rule updates.

• Organizations that invest in modern risk infrastructure as foundational technology rather than treating fraud prevention as a compliance cost center will gain decisive competitive advantages in speed, approval rates, and customer experience.

Agentic AI applications are also proving to be transformative

Coast now deploys agents conducting automatic 360-degree reviews - checking web presence, application data, login activity, support tickets, and employee counts - way before presenting analysts with TrustPoint scores ranking each section green or red. More powerfully, they're building co-pilots trained on historical fraud case retrospectives using RAG models. When analysts review cases, the AI suggests "check these 3 things" based on learned patterns, reducing review time from 30 to 5 minutes. Beyond investigation, rule recommendation agents monitor KPIs, chargebacks, and approval rates continuously, automatically suggesting threshold updates or new rules thus eliminating the week-long cycle of detecting fraud, analyzing patterns, creating strategies, and deploying responses.

Organizations are adopting an 80/20 automation framework, but practical application requires nuance

Coast maintained this ratio since founding: 80% automated decisions, 20% manual review of edge cases, constantly chipping away at that manual tail. The critical distinction lies in decision reversibility. Currency transaction reports over $10k are deterministic - agents can automate them completely. On the other hand, suspicious activity reports require judgment about what constitutes suspicious behavior under FinCEN guidelines, so human oversight here remains essential. Coast reduces risk thresholds when customers join Zoom calls or engage sales deeply, treating these as trust signals. The framework here isn't about arbitrary percentages but mapping automation levels to decision stakes and reversibility.

The consensus emerged clearly: 50% of attacks already leverage AI techniques, becoming universal within 2 years. Organizations excelling recognize risk orchestration as foundational infrastructure, not negotiable tooling.

Looking Forward: The Platform Wars Begin

It’s clear that the financial services industry stands at an inflection point where risk infrastructure becomes as foundational as databases. Just as no company debates building their own database anymore, risk orchestration platforms will emerge as essential buy-not-build infrastructure.

3 developments will accelerate over the next 18 months.

• First, regulatory frameworks will formalize AI oversight requirements, favoring organizations demonstrating they accomplish more reviews with equal or fewer resources rather than automating away judgment.

• Second, consolidation will intensify as fragmented point solutions prove insufficient against coordinated attacks, forcing migration toward comprehensive platforms or mounting losses.

• Third, competitive advantage shifts dramatically toward organizations deploying new fraud strategies within hours rather than weeks, as attackers iterate at machine speed.

But the most profound implication extends beyond just fraud prevention. Organizations building unified risk platforms gain strategic assets enabling rapid product innovation, dynamic underwriting, and personalized customer experiences. Those treating fraud as compliance cost centers rather than investing in modern infrastructure will find themselves unable to compete on speed, approval rates, or customer experience.

The gap between winners and losers in financial services will increasingly correlate with risk infrastructure sophistication, making platform selection one of the most consequential decisions executive teams face this decade.

You can download and view the full webinar here.