Fraud detection before it happens

The brief

Fraud costs businesses and consumers billions each year. One of our clients, a Fortune 500 payment network, saw an opportunity to put their existing fraud data to work and help their bank clients get ahead of it.

The challenge

The client needed a product that could flag when a merchant was vulnerable to fraud, using data from their existing products and partnerships. Off-the-shelf fraud tools tend to react after the fact. The goal here was to move earlier in the timeline, catching risk before it turned into a loss.

The solution

Tenjumps worked with the client's product team to turn existing transaction data into a usable early warning system. Fraud signals like this typically draw on patterns such as transaction velocity, geographic anomalies, and repeated small-value charges (a common precursor to larger fraudulent activity, often called card testing). The resulting product generated reports scoring fraud likelihood by location and account, with specific signals for card testing activity, giving banks and their merchants a way to act before losses occurred rather than after.

The result

By surfacing risk earlier in the transaction lifecycle, the product gave the client's bank customers a practical tool for protecting their merchants. The stakes are real: according to Mastercard's 2025 payment fraud prevention research with Financial Times Longitude, 42% of issuers and 26% of acquirers have saved more than $5 million in fraud attempts over a two-year period through AI-enabled fraud prevention.