Hey fintech fam, 💜

It’s been a crazy two weeks. Right after producing our first-ever three-day conference, FTW: NYC, during New York Fintech Week, my content team hopped on a plane to Orlando to cover FIS Emerald and get a firsthand look at where some of the biggest players in financial services are placing their bets next.

One major highlight? Sitting down with Stephanie Ferris for an exclusive interview on FIS’s major partnership with Anthropic and why the company believes AI agents will fundamentally reshape banking infrastructure.

Then, naturally, after covering enterprise AI and the future of financial services… we spent a day speed-running all four Disney World parks. 😆 Honestly, my team deserves an Olympic medal for the logistics alone. Read on to find out my top three rides.

Now that event season is finally slowing down a bit, I’m excited to get back into the rhythm of deeper reporting, analysis, and bringing you the conversations shaping where fintech goes next.

Though… one more important room to flag before I fully unpack my suitcase:

This Friday, May 15, I’ll be joining Georgina Merhom and the team at Solo for the Reliance Summit at the Crosby Street Hotel in New York City from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The room brings together leaders from the top 20 banks alongside senior executives in compliance, fintech, regulation, and product.

Last year’s summit featured names like Barney Frank, Andrew Yang, and Phil Goldfeder. Registration is complimentary but approval-only. RSVP here.

Now, let’s get into a topic that is clearly not going away anytime soon: fraud in the AI era.

From FIS launching a Financial Crimes AI Agent for banks to today’s deep dive with Jumio on continuous identity intelligence, one thing is becoming clear:

Fintech’s next infrastructure battle may ultimately come down to trust.

Let’s get into it.

Fourteen years ago, fraudsters trying to fool identity verification systems used taped-on passport photos, blurry black-and-white scans, and homemade fakes that most humans could spot instantly.

Today, the fraud is nearly indistinguishable from reality.

During the Fintech Security Summit at New York FinTech Week, Jumio Chief of Digital Identity Philipp Pointner walked the audience through that evolution in real time. Early fraud attempts included obvious fake IDs, manipulated selfies, and even people putting cat photos or playdough on their faces to confuse verification systems.

Now, he says, AI-generated identities have entirely industrialized fraud.

“What used to be lone wolf actors has become organized operations,” Pointner told me during an onstage fireside chat. “Now they have folder structures with face images, stolen data, templates, and AI pipelines that can generate thousands of fake identities automatically.”

The images he showed on screen were unsettling, not because they looked fake, but because they didn’t.

Some of the manipulated IDs were virtually impossible for the human eye to detect.

And the scale is accelerating fast. According to Jumio, AI-driven injection attacks increased 700% year over year as fraudsters increasingly deploy deepfakes, synthetic identities, and automated attack systems designed to bypass traditional onboarding controls.

That escalation is forcing a much larger reckoning across financial services.

The challenge is no longer simply verifying someone’s identity at onboarding. The challenge is understanding whether that identity can continue to be trusted over time.

Because the underlying assumption behind modern identity verification may no longer hold.

For years, identity systems largely operated like checkpoints: a user uploads an ID, passes verification once, gets approved, and the system moves on.

But AI-generated fraud is exposing the weakness in that model.

Fraud patterns, behavioral signals, and risk relationships often emerge long after an account is approved. In some cases, users who initially appear legitimate later become money mules or participate in first-party fraud schemes that would have been invisible during onboarding alone.

Verification may be a moment.

But trust, increasingly, is continuous.

And that idea may become one of the defining infrastructure shifts of the AI era in financial services.

The fraud problem fintech faces today is not simply growing. It is scaling structurally.

Pointner described what Jumio now sees behind many fraud attempts: organized office-like operations running identity attacks on an industrial scale.

“We are seeing offices with stacks of fake IDs on desks,” he said. “People coming in for what essentially looks like a nine-to-five job.”

The next phase may remove even those humans from the process altogether.

According to Pointner, many fraud networks are already moving toward agentic systems capable of generating and deploying synthetic identities automatically across platforms.

“They can generate 10,000 permutations of fake IDs at the click of a button,” he said.

That evolution matters because the economics of fraud have fundamentally changed.

Historically, fraud was constrained by labor. A fraudster might spend nearly an hour crafting a convincing fake identity to pass onboarding at one institution.

Now, AI dramatically lowers the cost while increasing the speed and scale of identity attacks.

At the same time, fintech and banking systems remain heavily dependent on static verification models built for an earlier era of fraud.

That mismatch is becoming harder to ignore.

“The industries don’t talk to each other,” Pointner said, describing what he observed attending fraud conferences across financial services. “Everyone says they wish they could collaborate more, but they’re still operating in silos.”

Meanwhile, the fraudsters are coordinating.

One of the more important ideas buried underneath the AI conversation right now is that identity fraud no longer stops at onboarding.

In many cases, that is where it starts.

A user may appear legitimate at account opening, only for risk patterns to emerge later across transactions, platforms, behaviors, or linked identities elsewhere in the ecosystem.

That reality is driving a broader shift from identity verification toward what Jumio increasingly calls “identity intelligence.”

Or as Pointner framed it during the discussion:

“Identity decisions should not expire.”

That philosophy underpins Jumio Watch, the continuous identity monitoring platform Jumio announced at the Fintech Security Summit on April 30, designed to reassess identity risk long after onboarding.

The idea is deceptively simple.

Instead of treating identity verification as a one-time event, the system continuously monitors identities over time, looking for new fraud signals, behavioral anomalies, and suspicious linkages that emerge after the original approval decision was made.

“We realized that new intelligence emerges over time,” Pointner said.

The implications are significant.

According to Jumio, applying cross-transaction identity analysis allowed the company to identify 25% more fraud by linking suspicious activity patterns across its broader network.

But the larger breakthrough came afterward.

The company discovered it could identify an additional layer of risk retroactively by continuously monitoring previously approved identities as new information surfaced.

That changes the underlying model entirely.

“If I use my passport in May and then my driver’s license in September, that’s normal,” Pointner explained. “If I open five bank accounts on the same day, who does that?”

The future of identity infrastructure may increasingly depend on answering that question continuously, not just once.

Jumio says the system is powered by its broader Identity Graph, which analyzes patterns and linkages across tens of millions of legitimate and fraudulent identities globally.

The larger advantage is not simply better onboarding verification.

It is network intelligence: fraud patterns identified in one environment, strengthening detection capabilities across the broader ecosystem.

The AI era is forcing fintech to face an uncomfortable reality: fraud prevention is no longer simply a security function.

It is becoming core infrastructure.

And, clearly, a competitive differentiator.

For years, fintech optimized heavily around onboarding conversion rates, approval speed, and growth metrics.

Now, companies are being forced to rethink whether those measurements are sufficient in an environment where AI-generated fraud evolves continuously after onboarding.

During the discussion, an audience member asked Pointner whether the industry is still measuring success too narrowly.

His answer pointed toward a broader reframing.

“The end-to-end measurement is really the damage that fraud and scams do to your business and to your consumers,” he said.

That may ultimately become one of the defining challenges of the AI fraud era.

While generative AI is making financial services more efficient, personalized, and scalable, it is simultaneously making identity far more difficult to trust.

And the systems designed to protect that trust are now being forced to evolve from static checkpoints into dynamic intelligence networks.

That shift mirrors a broader transformation unfolding across fintech infrastructure right now.

AI is changing how institutions think about fraud, compliance, onboarding, servicing, payments, and customer interaction.

But underneath all of it sits foundational questions:

How do you continuously verify trust in systems where AI can increasingly imitate humans convincingly enough to pass as real?

And how do you continuously verify trust when both legitimate users and fraudsters are operating through machines?

That is no longer just an identity problem.

It is becoming a financial infrastructure problem.

And companies capable of solving it may become some of the most important infrastructure players in fintech’s next era.

Because in the AI economy, identity is no longer static.

It is behavioral. Networked. Continuously evolving.

And the next generation of fintech infrastructure may be defined not by who verifies identity fastest, but by who can continuously determine whether that identity can still be trusted.

Still recovering from my Disney World hangover after hearing this during the fireworks show over Cinderella Castle. Both nostalgic and wildly motivating. Let me recover in my own time.

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Thanks for spending time with me today.

Love,

Nicole 💜