Welcome back to Fraudology.

Today's a solo episode built around a study that puts a real number on something fraud leaders have been debating for years: does organizational convergence for fraud actually move the needle on performance, or is it just an org chart trend?

For years, we've all benchmarked ourselves the same way. Approval rate here, chargeback rate there, maybe a manual review rate if we're being thorough. But the problem I've seen play out in company after company is this: optimize your approval rate, and your chargeback rate quietly creeps up. Optimize your chargeback rate by blocking more, and your approval rate takes the hit. You're never seeing the whole picture, just one lever moving at the expense of the other.

The Precise Yes metric is the headline finding from a new Liminal and Accertify study, but the study itself is much bigger than one metric. It surveyed 250 senior fraud, security, and risk leaders across five industry verticals specifically to test the thesis of organizational convergence for fraud and cybersecurity. I walk through what the data says, what forms of convergence actually improve fraud performance, and which ones don't move the needle at all.

This is a data-heavy episode, and I mean that as a compliment to the study. If you've ever needed a fraud KPI for CFO reporting that actually captures the full tradeoff between approvals and fraud loss, this is the one to bring back to your team.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• How the Precise Yes metric is calculated, and why approval rate vs chargeback rate alone can hide the real story of your fraud program
• Why organizational convergence for fraud and cybersecurity is being driven by operational necessity, not executive mandates, and what that means for how teams are actually changing
• Why login has become the new fraud control point, with account takeover, credential stuffing, and bot attacks all converging at that stage
• Why 63.6% of organizations still cannot distinguish a cyber attack from a fraud attack in real time, and what that costs them operationally
• How CISO fraud ownership is showing up earlier in the vendor decision process, and why board level fraud reporting is becoming a real governance topic
• Why partial integration is the highest-performing model for organizational convergence for fraud, and why pushing to full structural integration can actually erode the domain expertise that makes teams effective
• Why sharing just two or more use cases between fraud and cyber teams is the real performance tipping point, delivering a 1.5x improvement in fraud performance scores
• Why separate budgets between fraud and cyber teams actually outperform unified ones, contradicting one of the most common assumptions about convergence
• How fraud metrics by industry vertical vary, including why ecommerce and retail lead the pack while marketplaces lag significantly behind
• What the study found on agentic commerce fraud controls and synthetic identity fraud in ecommerce specifically

Who should listen:

• Fraud leaders looking for a fraud KPI for CFO reporting that captures the real tradeoff between approvals and fraud loss.
• Anyone building a business case for fraud and cybersecurity convergence and needing real data to support it.
• CISOs and security leaders increasingly involved in fraud tool evaluation and vendor decisions.
• Fraud teams trying to figure out where to start with shared fraud and cyber use cases without a full reorg.
• Ecommerce and marketplace fraud professionals wanting an ecommerce fraud benchmarking study to compare their own performance against.
• Anyone responsible for board level fraud reporting or making the case for fraud visibility at the executive level.