The Wespay Payments Symposium is where the payments industry comes together. Every year, hundreds of professionals from banks, credit unions, fintechs, and corporates gather to trade notes on innovation, strategy, compliance, and fraud. It’s one of the most trusted forums in payments. This year, the spotlight was on risk.
On September 11th in Los Angeles, our Head of Engineering, Paul Zaich, joined Kunal Datta (Head of Product at Unit21) and Shaun Hegsted (EVP at Zions Bank and Wespay Board Chair) for a breakout panel on The new frontier in payments risk: trusted business data to detect emerging threats.
Setting the stage — why identity comes first
Shaun opened with a simple truth: fraud doesn’t start with the transaction. It starts with who you’re doing business with. Whether the rail is ACH, wires, RTP, or cards, the entry point for risk is the same. If you don’t truly know the business on the other end, you’re leaving the door open for fraudsters.
That framing set the tone for the discussion: identity is the new front line of payments risk.
The challenge with business identity
Paul explained why business verification is fundamentally different from consumer identity:
- Fragmented records: With individuals, identifiers like SSNs and credit histories provide a single view. Businesses, on the other hand, exist across 50+ Secretary of State systems, often inconsistent and incomplete.
- Fluid ownership: Entities can restructure, merge, or dissolve quickly — sometimes without clear or timely public records.
- Exploited gaps: Fraudsters lean on shelf companies, shell entities, and mailbox addresses to slip past traditional checks.
As Paul put it: “With individuals, identity is relatively linear. With businesses, it’s a moving target — and fraud teams can’t afford to keep chasing shadows.”
New signals and smarter defenses
Paul walked through how proactive identity checks can shift fraud defense upstream:
- Clustering signals: Detecting multiple entities tied to the same mailbox or registered agent.
- Thin-file proprietors: Using contextual data to distinguish between legitimate small businesses and fraudulent ones with no substance.
- Web presence checks: Supplementing filings with digital signals that confirm a business is real and active.
Kunal built on this with the transaction view: once payments start flowing, fraud rings and behavioral anomalies surface — but without those early identity signals, monitoring systems are already on the back foot.
Shaun tied it together with the FI perspective: for credit unions and regional banks, the challenge isn’t just fraud loss — it’s balancing trust with growth. These institutions want to expand their business offerings, but need to do it without increasing exposure.
Data, automation, and AI
The panel agreed: not all data is equal. Authoritative government records like Secretary of State filings should form the backbone of risk programs, even if they aren’t real-time. Layering in automation, freshness checks, and AI-driven analysis makes those records usable at scale and speed.
Unit21 emphasized how transaction monitoring completes the picture, flagging behavior that only emerges after money moves. Together, identity data and behavioral data form a layered defense strategy.
Looking forward, the conversation pointed to a future where fraud prevention is less about reacting after funds are gone, and more about designing payments ecosystems rooted in trust from the start.
Final takeaway
Fraud prevention can’t wait until funds move. Payments leaders across the board, from top-tier banks to local credit unions, are realizing that the future of payments risk depends on getting business identity right at onboarding and reinforcing it throughout the customer lifecycle.
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