Every fraud and trust & safety leader knows the feeling. You block the fraud, keep chargebacks in check, and still end up defending your budget in the next planning cycle. Sift’s recent Blueprint session tackled a question that applies far beyond fraud: how does a team that’s traditionally seen as a cost center prove it belongs in the revenue conversation?
The short answer is to stop measuring success in losses prevented, and start measuring it in business outcomes enabled.
The attack surface, and the mandate, are both expanding
As more of daily life moves online, the attack surface for fraud grows right along with it. The average person now has 200+ apps on their phone, most of which touch some kind of identity or value exchange. That’s great for consumers, but it also means more entry points for the global Fraud Economy to exploit, on top of the internal challenges fraud teams already juggle, like fragmented tooling and siloed teams.
That expansion has pushed fraud’s job description well past chargebacks. The broader scorecard fraud teams are now expected to own looks like:
- Loss/chargeback rate: Still the baseline, and still non-negotiable.
- Abuse rates: Account takeover, policy abuse, and other platform-specific misuse.
- Acceptance rates: How many legitimate orders get through, which ties directly to payments and revenue.
- Customer experience: Stopping fraud without creating friction for legitimate customers.
- Operational cost: The “hidden” metric, since tools, headcount, and time all cost money that leadership now expects to see tied to outcomes.
Data from the MRC’s Global Payments and Fraud Report backs this up: loss rate, customer experience, and operational cost have become nearly equal priorities for fraud teams heading into 2026. That shift is colliding with a difficult moment for the industry, one where AI-driven layoffs are common and every team is under pressure to justify its value in business terms, not just security terms.
Why fraud gets left out of the revenue conversation
Fraud practitioners spend the overwhelming majority of their time tracking fraudsters, and that passion for fighting the good fight is exactly what makes people good at the job. But it also means fraud teams can lose sight of the fact that most of the rest of the business isn’t thinking about fraud at all, it’s thinking about growth, conversion, and customer experience.
It comes down to two sides of the same coin. Fraud teams optimize to reject risk by blocking suspicious orders, reducing abuse, and protecting the platform, while the rest of the org, across growth, marketing, payments, and sales, optimizes to approve and convert by getting more customers in the door and moving them smoothly through the funnel. The objectives are different, but they turn on the same underlying lever: how customers experience the platform as they come in.
Building the alliance: the “first team” concept
Bridging that gap starts with the “first team” concept: your real first team isn’t your direct reports, it’s your cross-functional peers in growth, customer success, product, security, and finance. The better you understand what they’re trying to accomplish, the more impact you can have. If customer support’s Objective and Key Result (OKR) is turnaround time, and some of their tickets stem from fraud-related friction, a joint OKR where fraud shares signals and support shares account context benefits both teams, and builds the internal influence that pays off later when you need dev resources, ops headcount, or budget.
“The areas that have the most impact tend to require a lot of cross-functional support. If there’s an initiative that can benefit not only my team or another team, but there’s essentially a joint impact, that’s going to ultimately bode very well for that person,” explained Kevin Lee, Field Chief Technology Officer at Sift.
The same logic applies to marketing: ask what they’d do with 30% more budget, then show how ingesting fraud signals earlier in the funnel frees up that budget by cutting waste.
“What would you do with 30% more marketing budget if we could save you that by ingesting these signals, using them to our benefit, and then pairing that with everything else that we have to make a better defense and better program and operation to fight fraud?” said Jacob Sanchez, Trust and Safety Architect at Sift.
As for where fraud should sit organizationally, audience polling split almost evenly between risk/compliance and operations, which suggests the reporting line matters less than the relationships.
“If you have good rapport with these different departments, you’re going to be doing well. If you are stuck in a scenario where this is the only team that you work with and it’s really siloed out, that’s gonna be a tough slog,” said Lee.
Reframing the story: from “blocked” to “enabled”
The heart of the discussion was a simple reframe:
- Standard: “Fraud prevented $X in losses”
- Ideal: “Fraud protected $X in revenue and approved Y more customers”
Same underlying work, but the second version is the one that gets you a seat at the table, because it’s quantified in terms that leadership outside the fraud function actually cares about.
There’s also a strategic opportunity worth highlighting. When a business expands into a new geography or product line, fraud can offer to help underwrite that expansion faster than competitors can. Speed and accurate signals become a genuine competitive advantage, not just a defensive measure.
Avoiding the success trap
One of the sharpest points raised was a familiar trap. You do the job well, and leadership responds one of two ways: “do more” or “we’re covered.” The same good result, but two very different outcomes for your headcount and budget.
“If you’re doing well, it can go one of two ways. Either you do more with what you have, or we’re doing well and so we’re covered. And sometimes that means we’re cutting the budget,” said Sanchez.
The way to land on “do more” instead of “we’re covered” is to consistently demonstrate that you’re doing more with the same resources, which builds the case for continued, or greater, investment rather than an assumption that the job is done.
That case-building can look different from team to team. Some lean on their own historical data and loss figures, some rely on industry benchmarks and external reports, and some are still struggling to make a compelling case at all. The teams with the strongest position are the ones that tie fraud outcomes directly to revenue or growth metrics rather than reporting losses in isolation.
Where to start now
There are three concrete starting points for any fraud leader looking to change the conversation:
- Reframe one metric in revenue terms before your next leadership conversation, rather than reporting it purely as a loss or block rate.
- Schedule time with one stakeholder outside of fraud to understand their OKRs and where fraud signals could help them hit their numbers.
- Update your performance summary for an executive audience, not a fraud team audience. Understanding top-level business priorities for the rest of the year, and which signals or systems your team can contribute to them, matters more to that audience than loss rates ever will.
Fraud teams have real, differentiated data and insight that the rest of the business needs. The teams that translate that insight into the language of revenue, growth, and customer experience are the ones that stop defending their existence and start shaping the roadmap.
Watch the full session: How to Have a Seat at the Revenue Table.
