Organisations that bring fraud prevention and cybersecurity together are significantly more effective at preventing fraud than those operating the two functions separately, according to new research from Accertify and Liminal.
The Accertify study, The Convergence Dividend, surveyed 250 senior fraud, cybersecurity and risk leaders across sectors including retail, eCommerce, travel, hospitality, marketplaces and entertainment. It concludes that organisations adopting an integrated approach to fraud and cyber risk achieve substantially better fraud prevention outcomes than those maintaining traditional organisational silos.
Researchers found businesses demonstrating four key “convergence” behaviours achieved fraud precision scores more than three times higher than organisations that had adopted none of them.
The report argues that the growing overlap between cyber threats and fraud is making closer collaboration increasingly essential. Payment fraud, bot attacks, account takeover and synthetic identity fraud now frequently span both security and fraud teams, yet almost two-thirds of organisations admitted they cannot distinguish between cyber attacks and fraud attacks in real time.
Rather than advocating immediate organisational restructuring, however, the research suggests successful convergence depends on operational maturity.
The highest-performing organisations first established shared ownership of fraud and cyber use cases, followed by integrated data and greater board-level oversight before formally combining organisational structures. Businesses that reorganised reporting lines without first integrating processes and data actually performed worse than organisations that had made no convergence changes at all.
The study also found unified data to be the strongest predictor of improved fraud performance. Organisations with integrated fraud and cybersecurity data consistently achieved better results, enabling more accurate risk decisions while reducing fraud losses without negatively affecting customer approval rates.
Another notable finding was the industry’s continued struggle to measure false positives. More than 94% of organisations surveyed said they do not actively measure legitimate customers incorrectly flagged as fraudulent, despite customer experience being cited as one of the primary reasons for investing in fraud-cyber convergence.
Industry performance also varied considerably. Retail and eCommerce organisations recorded the highest fraud precision scores, reflecting years of investment in digital fraud prevention, while online marketplaces faced the greatest challenge due to the complexity of simultaneously protecting buyers and sellers.
With 94% of respondents now identifying fraud-cyber convergence as a strategic priority and 70% involving Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in fraud technology decisions, the report suggests the conversation has shifted beyond whether fraud and cybersecurity should work together. Instead, the focus is increasingly turning to how organisations can integrate teams, technology and data in a way that delivers measurable improvements in fraud detection, operational resilience and customer trust.
Photo by Jantine Doornbos on Unsplash
