At A Glance
Effective fraud prevention is critical to balancing security and customer experience during onboarding, particularly as fraud tactics continue to evolve. Behavioral analytics can provide organizations with earlier insight into risky behavior to detect fraud, reduce unnecessary friction and manual reviews, and support more efficient onboarding decisions.31% of U.S. businesses say that operational stress from new account opening fraud has increased in 2026. Losses from new account fraud certainly have a bottom-line impact, but the repercussions extend further. High-volume attacks can overwhelm application flows, incur additional costs from downstream data calls and, most notably, necessitate friction that turns away legitimate customers.
Consumers’ reluctance to endure onboarding friction is only growing: In 2026, nearly four in 10 consumers reported considering abandoning the account-opening process, and 22% moved their business to another organization after a poor onboarding experience. Fraud attacks aren’t slowing down, though, which leaves fraud professionals in a top-of-funnel tug-of-war between onboarding efficiency and fraud-prevention effectiveness.
Looking to stop fraud without slowing good customers, two innovative financial services companies implemented Experian’s behavioral analytics solution to solve their top-of-funnel fraud problems. Here are the challenges they faced (and how behavioral insights helped solve them).
Pain point #1: Friction-filled identity verification
A buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider struggled to balance identity verification and customer experience needs. They sent every applicant through the same rigid, demanding onboarding process. The process took nearly 7 minutes to complete and required aspiring customers to submit documents, verify their identity with a selfie or even call the provider’s customer service team to prove their legitimacy. This strenuous process drove good customers away while still allowing sophisticated fraudsters to slip through.
“With (Experian’s behavioral analytics solution), we have enough information on good applicants sooner, so we can fast-track them and say ‘go ahead and get your loan, we don’t need anything else from you.’ And customers really love that.”
Head of Data Science, BNPL Provider
Pain point #2: Unseen fraud
Traditional identity verification and fraud prevention methods are table stakes, yet 67% of U.S. businesses say managing multiple fraud solutions creates significant or extremely significant complexity. Without the right orchestration strategy, even a robust fraud stack can still leave gaps for fraudsters to exploit.
In one digital bank’s case, fraudsters were slipping by defenses and hurting their customer service and internal overhead. Their fraud team was behind the 8-ball, reacting to attacks after they had occurred and giving fast-evolving fraudsters a leg up.
“You can quantify some things very easily: if bad domains are coming through you can identify and stop it. But if you see things look odd, yet you can’t set up controls, that’s where NeuroID behavioral analytics come in. NeuroID captures the unseen fraud.”
Manager of Fraud Strategy, Digital Bank
Pain point #3: Operational inefficiencies
Relying on outdated fraud prevention tools, both the BNPL provider and digital bank highlighted above allowed fraudsters to work their way downstream, triggering expensive, unnecessary checks that affected their businesses’ bottom lines. And they weren’t alone: Half of U.S. businesses said that for every $1 lost to fraud, they typically spend an additional $3 to $5 on recovery.
Because their existing solutions couldn’t reliably stop fraud without extensive manual reviews, both fraud teams avoided potentially lucrative growth opportunities because of the associated risk.
“Before (Experian’s behavioral analytics), we were not automatically denying applications. They were getting an IDV check and going into a manual review. But with (Experian) at the top of our funnel, we implemented automatic denial based on the risky signal, saving us additional API calls and reviews — and we’re capturing roughly four times more fraud. Having behavioral data to reinforce our decision-making is a relief.”
Manager of Fraud Strategy, Digital Bank
How can behavioral analytics optimize your fraud stack?
More than half of U.S. businesses expect new account opening fraud to remain a challenge over the next two to three years.
Behavioral analytics can help businesses meet both demands by identifying risk earlier, improving visibility into suspicious activity and enabling more precise decisions at the top of the funnel. With the right insights, organizations can streamline onboarding for trusted customers, intervene when risk appears and reduce the operational costs of unnecessary checks and manual reviews.
