The Payments Race: How to Verify at the Speed of Money

Cross-border payments are expanding at breakneck speed, with the total value expected to rise from $194.6 trillion in 2024 to more than $320 trillion by 2032. 

That presents an enormous growth opportunity for payments companies. But rapid global expansion can open the door for fraud and turn regulatory compliance into a moving target in markets around the world.

“There’s no one body in charge of looking across the world, at regulating things across borders,” said Mike Frost, Trust & Safety Product Solutions director at J.P. Morgan Payments. “That creates a patchwork of things that have to be addressed and challenges for clients.”

Payments companies see the potential in the global market, said Julio Peña, Trulioo lead solutions consultant. It’s not going to stop growing. 

“But that being said, it’s going to be hard to navigate unless you know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it,” he said. “It’s complex, it’s challenging, and you need to be agile in how you operate to be successful.”

Frost and Peña were part of a panel of experts in “The Payments Race: How to Verify at the Speed of Money” Trulioo webinar that explored tactics for navigating fraud and compliance challenges in an increasingly global payments industry. The webinar also covered, among other topics, the essential Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) technology for verifying businesses and ultimate beneficial owners.

Compliance and Fraud Challenges

As regulations become more intricate and payments companies more often operate across borders and languages, a one-size-fits-all approach to person and business verification can be a roadblock to growth. 

“The fact that companies want to evolve, that they want to get better and more efficient,” Peña said, “doesn’t mean that they’re ready for it.”

Enterprises also can encounter distinct fraud threats in each market, which creates a delicate balance between exposure to attack from low-friction onboarding or losing customers due to high-friction verification. 

Add to that the emergence of AI, as a tool both for and against fraud, and payments enterprises face a complex global environment where expectations for security are matched only by those for instant money movement. 

“Fraud is super complex,” Peña said. “There are so many ways that you can be fraudulent beyond stealing money. It’s interconnected. I don’t think you can talk about identity without talking about fraud.”

The Need for Expertise and Cutting-Edge Verification Technology

Manual, high-friction verification processes can add costs, slow onboarding and prevent companies from scaling quickly.

But automation alone isn’t enough. When payments enterprises onboard sole proprietors in a booming gig economy, for instance, automation paired with layered verification that waterfalls from KYB to KYC can help organizations scale with speed, efficiency and security. 

But even cutting-edge technology has its limits without ongoing innovation and expertise in markets around the world. As companies expand across the globe, they face regional idiosyncrasies in verification tactics, compliance requirements and fraud threats. 

That raises the importance of finding verification partners that have the right technology and the regional expertise to determine the most efficient onboarding strategies.

“Ultimately, being able to do this with efficiency takes a lot of knowledge,” Peña said. “As you’re growing and getting into new markets, that knowledge is not necessarily there. The use of consultants and experts in this world is very critical to your success so that you can achieve your results as soon as possible.”

Finding Success in a Complex Market

Agility and ongoing innovation are keys to success for payments companies facing evolving regulations and new fraud threats. The payments industry and the technology it uses to minimize risk and accelerate onboarding face the challenge of keeping pace.

“This area of identity, payments, fraud, everything around this ecosystem is constantly changing,” Frost said. “We could do this webinar a year from now and probably have very different things to talk about. Don’t assume that just because you have something set up well today, that it’s going to work well into the future.”

In today’s fast-moving digital economy, an agile, innovative verification strategy can be a payments company’s strongest competitive advantage.