High-volume transaction periods are critical revenue windows. But they’re also prime targets for fraudsters who exploit overwhelmed systems and understaffed teams. The challenge? Fine-tuning payment strategies by balancing seamless checkouts while declining fraud with precise and intelligent defenses.
Traditional systems, often siloed with limited interoperability to share intelligence, rely on rules and extensive manual reviews. These systems can buckle under seasonal pressure. Add AI-powered threats to the mix, and the result is overly strict decisioning, increased manual intervention, and a rise in false positives. According to the Merchant Risk Council, nearly half of merchants are now prioritizing improvements in AI and machine learning (ML) accuracy and automation to combat fraud more effectively.
However, even if your KPIs suggest low fraud rates, your system may be declining legitimate transactions. This hurts both revenue and customer trust.
Do you know the difference between fraud and a scam? Check out our complete list of scams, frauds, and financial crimes in our ABCs of fraud glossary.
Four strategies for merchants to prevent fraud during peak seasons
We’re in a new era where AI has transformed how merchants approach fraud. With fraudsters leveraging AI tools, VPNs, and vast amounts of personal data from the dark web, fraud detection is no longer just about spotting data inconsistency. It is about identifying behaviors that mimic fraud.
To maintain a competitive advantage during seasonal fluctuations, merchants require comprehensive transactional insights and advanced predictive analytics to enhance AI models, enabling more accurate and timely decision-making. This enables early detection of anomalies, behavioral inconsistencies, or bot activity before they impact your revenue or reputation.
Here are four strategies that fortify your defenses without overwhelming your internal teams:
- Implement behavioral biometrics: Monitor changes in contact details, devices, typing speed, or mouse movement can help detect potential fraud before the consumer checks out.
- Enable pattern recognition: Detect fraud patterns within transaction data. For instance, identifying accelerated attempts to transact at your checkout using various credentials from various locations within a short timeframe suggests a compromised account.
- Integrate global intelligence sharing: Leverage secure intelligence from multiple sources and identify threats that might not be apparent from a single payments ecosystem—for example, if several merchants or banks report similar fraudulent activities. Such shared insights are crucial in preventing fraudsters from impacting your financial and consumer trust.
- Achieve self-learning capabilities: Enhance your ML models with real-time, shared intelligence from across the industry. The true power of AI lies in its ability to automate threat detection, reduce manual reviews, and adapt to emerging threats, keeping your defenses sharp and scalable.
Curious about instantly verifying a customer’s identity without adding unnecessary friction to your checkouts? Explore the world of digital identity solutions, designed to increase conversion and block savvy fraudsters in real time.
In tomorrow’s payments landscape, success during peak seasons won’t come from reacting, but from predicting. As payment strategies shift to form hyper-personalized, consumer-centric journeys, don’t let fraud take away the joy of completing a purchase for a trusted, genuine consumer.
ACI Worldwide’s AI-powered payments intelligence supports accurate payment decision-making, reduces demands on internal teams, and enables scaling and adaptation to new threats in real time.
While others react, we predict!
Maximize acceptance, lower chargebacks, and free IT resources to remain strategic in an extremely competitive environment. Learn more at https://aciworldwide.com/predict.
ACI Fraud Management for Merchants 
