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A new study from fraud decisioning provider Accertify and intelligence firm Liminal has put numbers behind the case for fraud-cyber convergence, finding that organisations which adopt a specific set of operational behaviours approve $1,540 for every $1 of fraud lost, compared with $456 at organisations still working in silos.
The research, titled The Convergence Dividend: Quantifying What Fraud-Cyber Convergence Actually Delivers, surveyed 250 director-level and above fraud, risk and security leaders across retail and eCommerce, travel, restaurants and QSR, entertainment and media, and marketplace sectors.
It represents what Accertify and Liminal describe as the first large-scale empirical attempt to quantify the business outcomes of fraud-cyber convergence and identify the specific behaviours that separate high-performing organisations from the rest.
A recognised priority with no playbook
While 94 per cent of respondents recognised fraud-cyber convergence as a priority, the study found that many organisations lack a clear framework for putting it into practice.
To benchmark performance, the researchers developed what they call a “Precise Yes” metric, designed to capture how precisely a merchant says “yes” to customers. It is defined as the number of dollars approved for every $1 of fraud chargeback.
That metric became the basis for a four-pillar maturity model identifying the operational characteristics most closely associated with successful convergence.
The four pillars
The model identifies four behaviours that distinguish high-performing organisations from those still operating in silos.
The first is sharing two or more threat types or use cases, where fraud and cyber teams share joint accountability for specific threat categories. The second is sharing data through a common platform, where fraud and cyber data is integrated onto a shared pipeline that provides a single view of the customer across the lifecycle.
The third is regular discussion at the board level, with fraud elevated to a recurring board-level agenda item. The fourth is structural integration, where fraud and cyber teams are formally unified under the same organisational structure.
A measurable performance gap
Organisations demonstrating all four pillars achieved a mean Precise Yes Score of $1,540 approved per dollar of fraud lost, compared with $456 for those still working in silos. That 3.4x gap is driven primarily by a reduction in fraud chargeback rates, with top-tier organisations recording a 62 per cent reduction compared with those that have not begun convergence.
“One finding stood out: organisations perform better when they improve how fraud and cybersecurity teams share data,” Maryling Yu, Chief Marketing Officer of Accertify, explained. “Providing shared visibility into signals across the customer lifecycle gives teams a more complete understanding of risk, helping them approve more good customers with confidence, reduce unnecessary friction and drive stronger business outcomes.”
Order of operations matters
The study also found that the sequence in which organisations adopt these pillars makes a difference. Organisations that restructured their fraud and cybersecurity teams before establishing shared data, ownership and operational collaboration performed worse than those that maintained separate teams.
The finding suggests that successful convergence begins with shared workflows and intelligence rather than changes to the organisational chart.
Filip Verley, Chief Innovation Officer of Liminal, pointed to the practical implications.
“What the data shows is that these are operational behaviours, not structural ones,” Verley commented. “They don’t require a budget overhaul or a reorganisation. They require two teams deciding to work on the same problems and then building the habits that make that stick.”
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“That means there is hope that every organisation who undertakes a convergence journey can get to the elite performance tier,” he added.
Industry differences emerge
The study also provides what the researchers describe as the first peer-benchmarked view of fraud-cyber convergence across industries, with meaningful differences in maturity between sectors.
Retail and eCommerce organisations generally demonstrated the strongest performance, while marketplaces faced the greatest challenges in balancing customer approvals against fraud losses.
At the same time, the research found that 97 per cent of organisations are already on some path towards convergence, suggesting the shift is being driven by operational necessity rather than top-down executive mandates.
A case for starting with collaboration
The overall picture painted by the research is one where the barriers to convergence are less about budget or restructuring and more about how teams choose to work together.
The four-pillar model suggests that organisations can begin seeing results by establishing shared accountability for threat types and integrating data onto common platforms, without necessarily merging teams under a single reporting structure from the outset.
The full report is available for download at Accertify.com/2026-report.
Last Updated on July 22, 2026 by Nick Ross
