Meeting the AI moment: 3 trends financial services leaders are facing heading into 2027

There are almost an infinite number of problems to solve around identity verification, fraud prevention, and compliance risk. But when I talk to fraud and compliance teams, there are three main themes keeping them up at night.

1. The acceleration of fraud

The first one is a no-brainer. Fraud has been accelerating for years, and the explosion of AI pushed that even further.

But fraudsters don’t just have access to the same AI systems you and I have. They have access to unbounded and unregulated AI systems that will do things our AI systems will refuse to do. If I go tell Claude to hack into a system, it will say: “Tommy, I’m not doing that.” The people attacking you get no such answer from their AI. We’re playing by a completely different set of rules.

Generative AI has lowered the cost of executing large-scale attacks and raised their quality at the same time. Defending against that requires a stack that can change as quickly as the attacks do.

2. The rise of agentic users

This challenge is the newest of the three, and it’s been generating a lot of questions from customers and industry leaders alike. 

AI agents are moving from just recommending things to actually doing things, including moving money. That changes the question your systems have to answer. It's no longer only "is this person who they say they are?" It's "who authorized this action, what is this agent allowed to do, and should it be allowed to do it right now?" 

Know Your Agent (KYA) needs to become a part of every financial institution and fintech’s tech stack. 

If you’re not feeling ready for this, you’re not alone. When I talk to CEOs at banks, credit unions, fintechs, and payments companies, I hear a version of the same sentence: we are completely unprepared for KYA. 

Agentic users introduce new questions around identity, access, and risk that many existing fraud and authentication stacks aren’t built to handle. Financial organizations can no longer apply one-size-fits-all rules to block all bots. Now they need to be able to distinguish between a legitimate agent and a malicious bot, while governing what they can and can’t do at the same time. 

The good news is that this trend is still new. Many customers aren’t using agents in this way yet, so now’s the time to get ahead of it before it becomes a problem. 

3. The pressure for efficiency in the “AI era”

And then, just to make all of this much more complicated, there’s an underlying pressure for efficiency. CEOs and boards are mandating AI-driven automation across back-office operations. That mandate is landing on risk and compliance teams that have spent a decade being told the opposite: be careful, add a reviewer, document everything.

Now the same teams are being asked to do more with the headcount they already have, and to show their work on how they’re using AI to work faster and smarter. That's a hard reversal to execute, and it's the number one thing our clients are being graded on right now.

The perfect storm

So you're solving accelerating fraud, with fraudsters holding unrestrained tools. You're provisioning access for a new category of non-human user. And you're doing both with less.

The question becomes: how are you going to do all of these things at once?

Alloy is built to help you meet this moment

Everything Alloy is building right now helps you stay ahead of these three trends. In fact, we’ve been building towards this moment for a while now, with a few key call-outs. 

Open orchestration. Alloy has built the industry’s largest open data ecosystem. Period. We build integrations with all the best-in-class solutions in the market. As new solutions emerge to address new fraud threats, we vet them, build integrations, and make them available to clients. And we do this through real, productized, secure partnerships and integrations.

Fraud Signal. Fraud Signal is our proprietary predictive machine learning model that leverages network intelligence across our 900+ clients to help identify emerging fraud patterns earlier and with greater confidence. 

Risk-based authentication. Alloy’s approach to risk-based authentication is the framework for solving KYA. Alloy collects, enriches, and analyzes signals from onboarding and every customer touchpoint after to identify the human or agent, authenticate their action, and dynamically adjust friction based on their permissions and level of risk present.

AI Assistant. Our AI Assistant is your agentic partner for automating repetitive back-office tasks, giving your team time to focus on bigger initiatives, and showing upper management that you’re driving efficiency gains. 

Alloy’s building the playbook to take on the industry’s biggest challenges. Join us!