Balancing Friction and Fraud in Digital Account Opening
Every layer of friction added to catch fraud drops a real applicant. Every step removed to lift conversion opens the door to synthetic identities and AI-generated documents. The institutions that win are the ones that stop treating this as a trade-off.
Drawn from delivering digital account opening into production for a large credit union and more than a decade of data and risk platforms for American Express through IBM, this talk lays out a practical playbook for getting the balance right: the five-minute design budget, why the personal data already leaked across the internet has made traditional knowledge-based verification unreliable, and how intentional friction applied surgically builds confidence rather than killing conversion.
The session walks through the modern fraud prevention stack, from identity and document verification through liveness, email reputation and device intelligence, and ends with a recommendation pyramid that gets the large majority of legitimate applicants through without friction while raising the cost for fraudsters. Every recommendation is anchored in a shipped deployment, not a slide.