The Case for a Unified Identity Risk Score and API Call

In an era where every basis point of fraud loss matters, financial institutions are burning capital, increasing risk exposure, and slowing growth by using fragmented identity verification systems. A holistic and comprehensive risk score is needed.

As identity fraud becomes more sophisticated, traditional verification systems are falling behind, exposing financial institutions and inflating spend on tools that no longer deliver. In 2024 alone, identity fraud cost U.S. consumers over $47 billion, a $4 billion jump from the year before.   

Despite growing losses, most financial institutions continue to rely on legacy verification that can’t handle the scale, complexity, or speed of today’s identity fraud. Three key reasons explain why these strategies are falling short—and financial institutions can’t afford to ignore them.

1. Static data wasn’t built for today’s fraud risk environment  

The biggest problem comes down to data. Traditional verification relies heavily on static data, rule-based decisions, and siloed risk assessments. These solutions leverage sources such as credit bureau checks or government-issued IDs, which are often outdated, incomplete, and can be easily manipulated by malicious actors.  

Static data is especially ineffective against synthetic identity fraud, which is one of the fastest-growing threats in banking. Without dynamic signals or real-time intelligence, synthetic IDs slip through the cracks, remaining undetected for months or appearing later as credit charge-offs rather than being flagged as fraudulent.

2. Fragmented tools are weakening verification

Many banks and credit unions are also stitching together disconnected point solutions with inconsistent and siloed signals, blind spots in online user behavior, and mounting costs. The result? More false positives and negatives that frustrate legitimate customers and lead to onboarding bottlenecks and higher abandonment rates. At the same time, bad actors continue to find a way in.   

Fideo Verify was architected differently—one score, one API call, full-spectrum intelligence. It’s a ground-up reinvention, not another layer. 

3. A patchwork approach hurts the bottom line

That same fragmented approach drives up costs. Most institutions pay for dozens of verification tools, many with overlapping functionality. Each of these solutions typically carries their own per-call verification costs. These incremental fees stack up across the customer journey, driving up costs without delivering a proportional improvement in fraud prevention. 

How can financial institutions uplevel their verification strategy?    

It’s clear that financial institutions need a more intelligent verification strategy—one that moves beyond static data and fragmented tools to deliver stronger protection. That starts with access to diverse data, but more importantly, the ability to connect identity signals in real time through systems that continuously learn and adapt.  

Fideo Verify processes billions of identity attributes using proprietary machine learning models trained on real-world fraud patterns, anomaly detection, and adaptive scoring. Our models continuously learn across synthetic IDs, behavioral fingerprints, and digital exhaust to ensure the risk score reflects real-time truth—not outdated heuristics.

Equally important is that verification is unified. A holistic approach improves identity detection, streamlines operations, and reduces vendor overhead to keep costs in check, while catching 50% more fraud than your current solutions in real time.

Fideo Verify: Every signal connected, one identity risk score 

Fideo’s AI-powered identity verification solution, Verify, is purpose-built to address each of the key challenges financial institutions face so they can stop bad actors at the gate—during account opening, loan origination, and other high-risk transactions.  

Verify provides the holistic view of identity risk that financial institutions need by distilling billions of identities supported by millions of daily data updates. This powers thousands of checks backed by hundreds of sub-category validations across eight industry-leading verification categories to form one simple API call. This process provides the most accurate and comprehensive risk score in nanoseconds—a game changer for banks and credit unions.  

A breakdown of how Verify turns the complexity of identity verification into simplicity:

• Billions of identities   
• Millions of updates daily   
• Thousands of attribute checks   
• Hundreds of sub-category validations   
• 8 categories of leading checks   
• 1 simple API call

The available check categories include:

• Synthetic identity checks: Detect fabricated profiles through mismatched personal details and abnormal device or IP linkages  
• Email checks: Verify email legitimacy by checking deliverability, domain risk, creation date, disposability, and real-time usage coupled with usage history  
• Breach checks: Analyze extensive known breached data sets to assess identity exposure, recency, and potential use in attacks  
• General identity/fraud checks: Analyze applicant data against a comprehensive and dynamic identity database, including global sanction lists and expected identity fragment coherence  
• Phone checks: Identify risk surrounding a phone number, including porting, DNO, observed usage, and more  
• Digital checks: Compare identity against an associated digital footprint encompassing social networks, mobile devices, and general internet behavior  
• Location checks: Compare location data to detect anomalies and inconsistencies in residency and travel patterns  
• IP address checks: Identify risk associated with an IP address, including location, proxy types, blocklists, and others

Streamlining verification into a single call creates a more cost-efficient infrastructure. Unlike fragmented approaches—where organizations pay separately for each verification step—Fideo charges one flat rate per user session for unlimited checks, significantly reducing costs. This model not only cuts overhead and redundancies from managing multiple point solutions but also delivers meaningful savings through improved fraud prevention and process efficiency.

Additionally, when Verify is applied at the top of the funnel, organizations can instantly assess whether an applicant is legitimate or high risk, before triggering expensive KYC processes or introducing friction for trusted users. The model is also built with flexibility in mind, allowing organizations to access the full verification suite or implement it on a modular basis.

Verify delivers the intelligent infrastructure financial institutions need to be successful, delivering a 360-degree view of identity risk with a powerful, composition-based fraud risk score. The result is faster, smarter decisions that reduce fraud, lower operational costs, and deliver stronger ROI—proving that better identity verification doesn’t have to mean more complexity.

Fideo is building the trust infrastructure for all digital finance. One call. One score. Full-spectrum intelligence.

Contact us today to request a free trial.