Artificial intelligence is becoming the core operating system of modern merchant commerce. When thousands of payments and fraud leaders converged in San Antonio for the MAG Payments Conference 2025, AI’s promise to revolutionize efficiency and personalization dominated every corridor conversation, main stage session, and hallway debate.
Similarly, AI has accelerated the race between merchants and fraud actors. The urgency around risk was palpable at this year’s MAG: merchants are being asked to deliver instant, seamless payments experiences while shouldering ever-heavier compliance, fraud, and consumer trust burdens. Without the right systems and strategies in place to scale, operational cracks are starting to show.
At Sift, we see these shifts play out daily with our customers. In the below video, I briefly share how AI-driven decisioning is helping businesses do more than defend against fraud, instead reframing risk as a sustainable growth center.
3 Patterns Reshaping Fraud and Payments
Fraud is a strategic challenge that shapes revenue, reputation, and competitive position. A select few forces stood out at MAG as clear indicators for where we’re headed.
AI Escalates the Competitive Rift
Conference sessions highlighted a widening gap: leaders embedding AI are successfully cutting manual reviews and boosting approvals as compared to those relying on static rules. For the latter, costs are rising and inefficiencies are compounding. Delaying or refusing adoption is no longer on the table.
Organized Abuse Scales Up
Fraud has gone from largely opportunistic to highly coordinated. From chargeback “how-to” kits sold on social platforms to marketplaces offering synthetic identities and bot farms, abuse is industrializing. This scale is forcing executives to rethink loss models and recognize abuse as a structural, not incidental, threat.
Speed and Trust Collide
Customers expect instant checkout. Regulators and issuers demand airtight controls. The tension between frictionless payments and secure authentication is intensifying, and it’s moved from the fraud team’s desk to the boardroom. The winning path will be context-aware defenses that let trusted customers glide through while intercepting sophisticated threats.
What Made MAG 2025 Different
This wasn’t another cycle of “new tech, new buzzwords.” The difference this year was urgency. Leaders weren’t asking whether AI would reshape their fraud operations, but how fast they could restructure teams, retrain models, and redesign workflows to keep pace.
That’s what made MAG 2025 invaluable: it wasn’t just about what AI can do, but about what we, as an industry, are choosing to do with it.
How Executives Should Take Action
Four imperatives crystallized for executives across industries:
1. Audit Your Data Readiness. Clean, real-time, cross-channel data is the lifeblood of effective AI systems. Before adopting new tools, leaders need confidence that their pipelines can support adaptive decisioning.
2. Elevate Fraud from Cost Center to Strategic Lever. Fraud isn’t just an operational drag—it influences conversion, lifetime value, and customer trust. Organizations that treat fraud strategy as a growth enabler, not an expense line, will outperform.
3. Anticipate Regulatory Shockwaves. Payments and fraud are increasingly impacted by pivoting global mandates. Leaders who consistently align compliance strategy with innovation will transform regulation from a burden into a competitive advantage.
4. Forge Ecosystem Partnerships. Fraudsters scale globally, and so must our defenses. Collaboration between merchants, processors, issuers, and solution providers is critical to outpacing organized abuse. Conferences like MAG highlight the value of collective intelligence, but it’s on leaders to turn those conversations into action.
The payments industry is entering an era where AI will be the defining factor separating leaders from laggards. But technology alone isn’t the answer. Success will depend on how executives calibrate fraud, payments, product, and customer experience strategies around trust as a competitive advantage.
How do your fraud rates stack up against competitors? Visit FIBR, Sift’s Fraud Industry Benchmarking Resource, to compare data across markets and geos.
