A new survey shows nearly half of all financial services executives are struggling with managing credit risk and detecting and preventing fraud. The survey also shows many are revamping their credit risk decisioning and fraud prevention strategies in 2025, with AI playing a prominent role.

These are among the key findings from the survey of nearly 200 key decision makers at financial services providers globally to understand their risk decisioning and fraud challenges across the customer lifecycle, decisioning investment priorities, and AI opportunities. The survey was conducted by Provenir, a global leader in AI Decisioning solutions.

Over half of all respondents plan to invest in risk decisioning solutions and AI/embedded intelligence in 2025 and beyond. At present, nearly 60% of respondents say they find it difficult to deploy and maintain risk decisioning models. 55% of executives recognize the value of AI to make streamlined strategy decisions, and in its ability to provide AI-powered performance improvement recommendations, and 53% see the value in the ability to automatically tune models to make better, more accurate decisions.

Key priorities for customer and account management are real-time, event-driven decisioning (65%), eliminating friction across the customer lifecycle (44%), and increasing customer lifetime value (44%).

Over half of respondents agree the biggest data challenge they face is being able to easily integrate data sources into decisioning processes.

Survey insights also reveal the pitfalls of operating multiple decisioning systems across the customer lifecycle. 59% of respondents say this is causing a lack of seamless data flow and unified insights, while 52% say it creates operational inefficiencies. Additionally, 28% said it contributes to an inconsistent customer experience.

When asked about data and fraud, 37% say they struggle with effective data orchestration for application fraud prevention, specifically in not being able to easily ingest and integrate new data sources, while 36% are challenged in using AI and machine learning for fraud prevention. Nearly one-third of respondents agree that the most important aspect for comprehensive fraud strategies is the ability to break down data silos between fraud and credit risk teams.

“Financial institutions are keenly aware of today’s increasingly complex threat landscape and must adopt new approaches for improved risk decisioning and fraud prevention across the customer lifecycle while providing frictionless and personalized customer experiences,” said Carol Hamilton, Chief Product Officer, Provenir. “With an AI decisioning platform more closely aligning credit and fraud risk teams, financial services executives can ensure holistic, end-to-end decisioning with a complete view of customers across the entire lifecycle.”

The survey was conducted November-December 2024; respondents were based in North America, EMEA, Latin America and Asia Pacific, holding the titles of manager, director, vice president, or above.