In today’s commercial banking landscape, fraud is evolving faster than most financial institutions can keep up. To explore how banks are thinking about consortium data, commercial fraud defense, and upcoming innovations, we turned to two experts at the center of this work: Dalit Amitai, who leads product development, and Jen O’Connor, who works closely with customers.
The Market Is Asking for Better Data, and More of It
Dalit: We’ve been hearing more customers ask about consortium models. You mentioned recently that one of your largest customers was especially vocal during a dinner meeting. What drove their thinking?
Jen picks up on a recent customer conversation that brought this into sharp focus.
Jen: Yes, my customer really pushed on one point: you must join a consortium. For them, consortium data means better, richer intelligence to layer into fraud decisioning, more insights, more signals, and more context than a single bank can produce on its own. They see it as essential. If multiple banks are seeing a beneficiary, and another has already marked it as a confirmed fraud case, that’s powerful. It elevates a borderline alert into a critical one.
Dalit: That aligns with what we see in the data, too. On the commercial side, fraud is high risk, with high-value payments increasing the potential for loss, which can sometimes be catastrophic. A consortium provides network-level insights and industry-level visibility that help improve fraud detection while reducing unnecessary customer friction.
Why Consortium Data Matters More in Commercial Fraud
Jen: Exactly. Think of it as a three‑layer approach:
- Network-level insights—What’s happening inside your own book that may not surface in isolation?
- Consortium insights—What similar patterns are peers seeing?
- Industry-level insights—What are the macro fraud trends emerging more broadly?
All three together create a robust fraud strategy that banks can trust.
Dalit: A consortium creates a continuously evolving pool of risk insights powered by payment and fraud signals shared across the banking network. When we first introduced our consortium concept to several large regional banks, for some it was already a priority, while for others it was entirely new. Yet, across the board, the response was immediate intrigue and strong engagement.
Jen: Yes, the message landed. They want anything that helps reduce false positives without sacrificing security.
Understanding Industry Consortium Options: What Banks Want to Know
With demand growing, conversations are quickly shifting from whether to join a consortium to what good looks like.
Dalit: Customers often ask whether all consortium options are created equal, what they should look for when evaluating them, and which capabilities matter most. Jen, how do you typically answer that?
Jen: I always start by saying they’re absolutely not identical. A consortium that only provides transaction-level data or relies solely on self-reported fraud cases offers limited value. A strong consortium must be additive, easy to access, and capable of delivering both out-of-the-box integration and customizable insights. No one wants to spin up a separate project just to use it. These insights should simply appear as an additional set of risk indicators within their existing risk platform. Customers consistently tell us they want that level of ease and immediacy, and it’s a true differentiator.
Dalit: I can see how that would be a major advantage: no vendor coordination, no heavy development effort, no costly and time-consuming implementation. You simply turn it on and start benefiting immediately.
Jen: Yes, that is an operational game changer. I mean, think of it from a bank investigator’s perspective. Without integrated consortium intelligence, when an alert is triggered outside the risk platform, often because a beneficiary is new or unknown, the investigator has to go to another application, consult a colleague, or even log in from a different application. Then they must manually enter all the payment details, the payee's name, amount, date, everything, just to get the information needed to assess the risk. That’s the typical process today. When this functionality is built directly into the risk mitigation platform, investigators save significant time and effort, and data integrity is preserved.
Dalit: The type of efficiency that goes into integration makes the consortium part of the analytics, and that is critical. With that in mind, have we heard about consortium models that focus exclusively on commercial payments fraud?
Jen: Surprisingly, a lot of customers don’t initially recognize how different commercial-only fraud is from retail banking fraud. I often explain that any bank with business clients making payments needs to participate in a commercial payments-focused consortium because the vantage point is entirely unique. Because the consortium is backed by fraud expertise embedded within a payments company, it can surface in-network activity across global cash management solutions, so banks gain visibility into business payment behaviors and the nuanced patterns that come with them. When you combine that visibility with data analysis and native fraud models, it creates significantly greater confidence and real, measurable value for banks.
The Value Case: Reducing Customer Friction at Meaningful Levels
If that sounds theoretical, early modelling is starting to show what this looks like in practice.
Dalit: You’ve shared feedback from early modeling that showcases the power of a commercial fraud consortium to meaningfully reduce false positives and customer friction.
Jen: Right. In early analysis across 10 banks, we saw potential for up to a 20% reduction in false positives, which in turn will reduce customer friction by minimizing unnecessary payment interruptions, avoiding legitimate transaction declines, and streamlining the customer experience.
That’s a significant operational impact. Imagine an investigator who typically works 100 alerts a day suddenly having 80 instead, without reducing safety. For a team of five or six investigators, that’s like freeing up the capacity of a full‑time employee.
Together, this delivers two clear advantages: improved operational efficiency with lower cost, and significantly better, lower‑friction customer experience.
Dalit: Those are the kinds of differentiators that really resonate. Another way to think about it is the impact on the bank itself. By freeing up capacity, teams can focus on higher‑value work instead of routine alert review. And with reduced customer friction, the fraud solution helps strengthen the bank’s payments reputation and support revenue growth.
Preparing for Launch: The Market Is Ready
Jen: One question I had was whether payments companies are ready to talk publicly about fraud consortium models or if it is currently still in the pilot phase.
Dalit: We are. The demand is there, and we’re preparing the market. The goal is to give banks a clear path to participation as soon as they are ready.
Jen: That makes sense, especially since customers are already asking for clearer visibility into how they can engage once the consortium is officially launched.
Where the Conversation Goes Next
Dalit: Yes, our goal is to clearly reflect what we're hearing from the market and how we’re responding.
Jen: And customers are talking about this. They’re interested. They want better insights, less noise, and tools that reflect the complexity of commercial payments. A consortium model is the next logical evolution.
Closing Thoughts
Fraud in commercial banking is a shared challenge, and no institution should have to fight it alone. As Jen and Dalit highlight, consortium data doesn’t just strengthen detection. It helps reduce friction, streamline operations, and build resilience across the entire ecosystem.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice, Bottomline has already launched its pilot fraud intelligence exchange with leading banks.