Fraud and compliance are the two domains in payments where the cost of getting it wrong isn’t just financial — it’s existential. A merchant account terminated for excessive chargebacks, a fintech licence revoked for AML failures, or a platform hit with OFAC sanctions violations can’t be fixed with a patch and a hotfix.
The Fraud & Compliance topic on PaymentBrief approaches these domains from a practitioner perspective. Not the regulatory text — that’s available elsewhere — but the operational realities of building fraud controls that work, compliance programmes that scale, and chargeback management processes that don’t eat your operations team alive.
Coverage includes: the mechanics of first-party fraud (friendly fraud) and why it’s growing faster than traditional card fraud; dispute management workflows and how to structure a chargeback response programme; 3DS2 and its actual effect on conversion and fraud rates in different markets; AML programme design for fintech operators — transaction monitoring, suspicious activity reporting, and how to calibrate alert thresholds without generating false-positive noise that your compliance team can’t process; KYC/KYB design patterns and the vendor landscape; and the evolving regulatory requirements across key markets including the EU’s AML package, the UK’s APP fraud reimbursement mandate, and Singapore’s MAS fraud liability framework.
We pay particular attention to the Southeast Asian compliance environment, where regulatory requirements are evolving rapidly and the compliance vendor ecosystem is less mature than in Western markets.
How 3DS2's challenge flow mechanics, issuer threshold decisions, and liability shift rules create measurable conversion costs that operators need to actively manage.
How KYB's beneficial ownership complexity, UBO screening requirements, and orchestration tooling differ from KYC — and what that means for embedded finance platforms at scale.