Digital Content Editor, Eve Goode speaks exclusively with Ben Anderson, Head Advisor of Dispute Strategy at Quavo about preventing and detecting scams.
Our research shows that trust is directly tied to business outcomes.
Customers separate the fraud event from how their institution responds, and that response is shaping loyalty and long-term value.
In fact, roughly 61% of consumers say a poor fraud experience has a meaningful impact on their loyalty.
That experience also spills over.
Roughly 72% say a fraud experience affected their confidence in other services at the same institution, while almost 59% say they are likely to switch institutions if the process is overly long and tedious.
Fraud resolution is no longer a back-office process. It is a core part of customer and risk strategy.
For security leaders, that means strategy has to extend beyond prevention and detection.
Those capabilities remain essential, but institutions also need a plan for what happens after a fraud event and how that experience feeds back into risk management.
Dispute teams see early signals of emerging scams, shifting customer behavior and process gaps every day, but that intelligence is often trapped in a silo, separate from fraud, cybersecurity and enterprise risk teams.
Connecting those functions gives institutions a fuller view of risk, strengthens controls and delivers a more consistent response when customers need support most.
Scams are increasingly driven by social engineering and customer manipulation rather than traditional account compromize, and that is the blind spot for many institutions.
Our 2026 research shows nearly four in five consumers reported some form of scam exposure, which demands a broader view of scam risk than transaction monitoring alone can provide.
The bigger vulnerability, though, is organisational.
Consumer education is usually a one-way broadcast – a warning email from a no-reply address – when it needs to be a live feedback loop.
The intake team hears about emerging scams first, often weeks before they show up in fraud reporting, but that intelligence rarely travels.
Breaking down the silo between fraud and intake turns those early conversations into education that reflects what customers are actually being targeted with.
The same logic extends to marketing, which is already doing social listening for brand reasons.
Point that capability at scam chatter and impersonation accounts, and institutions can identify social media scams far earlier, feeding directly back into both consumer education and dispute handling strategy.
Technology’s real opportunity is context.
AI and automation can bring together transaction history, behavioral patterns, device intelligence, prior disputes and other signals so investigators can quickly tell whether a claim is fraud, confusion or something else, without adding friction to a customer’s experience.
Our research also points to a real opportunity to head off avoidable disputes before they become operational costs.
Nearly four in ten customers have filed a dispute they later realized may not have been valid, and that is a meaningful signal.
Clearer merchant recognition, better transaction detail and pre-claim prompts can help customers understand a charge before they ever file.
The goal is not simply to process claims faster.
It is to help customers and institutions reach better outcomes with less friction on both sides.
The gap is not evenly distributed, and that is the useful part.
We found that perceptions of fairness and ease of reporting improve steadily with age.
Consumers aged 18 to 34 rate both significantly lower than those over 55, while gender, ethnicity and income barely move the needle.
Crucially, younger consumers are not asking for more contact.
They are the most likely to say communication was too frequent, and the most likely to blame themselves for a scam loss.
The problem is not volume; it is that updates tell them nothing actionable.
A status message that never changes reads as opacity, however often it arrives.
Transparency has to mean substance: what stage the investigation has reached, what happens next and where the customer stands in the meantime.
Our 2025 research established that how an institution handles fraud can matter more to trust than the fraud event itself.
The 2026 research builds on that, showing expectations continue to rise and the conversation has expanded beyond fraud resolution into scam handling and friendly fraud.
This year’s data quantifies the stakes, showing that how institutions manage these moments influences loyalty, share of wallet and churn, with roughly 59% of customers saying they are likely to switch institutions if the resolution process is overly long and tedious.
Keeping fraud and dispute operations separate from broader security and risk strategy makes those risks harder to see and harder to solve.
Nearly 38% of customers have also filed a dispute they later realized may not have been valid, a sign that mistaken claims and friendly fraud are becoming a real operational drain when they are not caught early.
At the same time, many organisations still are not fully measuring emerging exposures such as scam liability and friendly fraud.
Bringing dispute intelligence into the broader risk and security strategy gives institutions sharper visibility into customer behavior, emerging threats and operational gaps, leading to better decisions on both risk management and retention.
Prioritize operational efficiency and customer outcomes together, not as separate tracks.
Automation reduces manual work, improves consistency and frees investigators to focus on the cases that truly need human judgement.
Better data surfaces trends and helps prevent avoidable disputes before they start.
These efforts cannot happen in isolation.
Thirty-six percent of customers say both prevention and resolution equally drive trust, while 34% favour better prevention and 29% prioritize faster resolution.
Institutions that over-invest in one at the expense of the other risk leaving a trust gap on whichever side they underweight.
Nearly 70% of consumers say how their institution handles resolution matters more to trust than discovering the fraud itself, up from 62% in 2025.
Fraud resolution has become central to how institutions protect relationships and fuel long-term growth.