While fraud vendors compete on transaction monitoring and behavioral analytics, they're solving a secondary problem. By the time fraudulent transactions occur, the damage is already done.

Fraudsters are inside your platform with established accounts and verified identities.

I've been tracking patterns across fraud prevention approaches. Most platforms focus intensely on what users do (transaction patterns, behavioral anomalies, velocity checks). But there's a more fundamental question being largely ignored: 

Who are these users in the first place? 

If you can't establish a trusted identity at onboarding, everything downstream is built on an uncertain foundation.

The fraud prevention industry has this backwards. Teams layer sophisticated transaction monitoring on top of weak identity verification, then wonder why organized fraud rings keep penetrating their defenses. 

If you let fraudsters in with fake or stolen identities, no amount of transaction monitoring will stop them cleanly.

Enter Persona, a San Francisco-based platform (founded 2018) that's built around the thesis: "Fraud isn't just a transaction problem. It's an identity problem." Instead of focusing on what people do, they focus on who they are, using comprehensive identity verification as the foundation for everything downstream.

Based on my research into their deployments across fintechs, marketplaces, and enterprises, they're addressing the architectural flaw in how most companies think about fraud prevention sequencing.

From my research across platforms dealing with fraud at scale, a clear pattern emerges around where fraud prevention actually needs to start.

Sophisticated fraud doesn't begin at the first suspicious transaction. 

It begins when fraudsters establish their presence with fake identities, stolen credentials, identity mules, or synthetic profiles. By the time they commit fraud, they've aged accounts, established patterns, and positioned themselves to look legitimate.

A lot of fraud platforms are strongest at transaction monitoring (analyzing payment patterns, behavioral signals, velocity checks). But if the underlying identity was never properly verified, you're monitoring the behavior of someone whose identity you never truly established. 

You're catching symptoms while missing the root cause.

Identity verification is often treated as a compliance checkbox at onboarding rather than the foundation of fraud prevention. Teams invest heavily in transaction monitoring, behavioral analytics, and payment fraud tools while identity verification remains a simple pass/fail check that sophisticated fraudsters have learned to bypass.

Most teams still debate where fraud prevention should begin. Persona pushes a clear view. It starts with identity.

Talk to a handful of practitioners and you’ll hear the same pattern. Fraud stacks get built in layers. Basic identity verification at onboarding, then heavier transaction monitoring, behavioral analytics, and scoring as users start to move money. My experience at Dodgeball confirms this.

The assumption is baked in. Transaction-level signals are where sophisticated fraud prevention happens.

But fraud isn't just a transaction problem. It's an identity problem, and most fraud prevention tools focus on what people do, not who they are. Persona argues that the only scalable way to fight fraud is to anchor decisions in verified identity. Not just surface-level signals.

This means treating identity verification as infrastructure. 

Continuous, adaptive, and present across the entire customer journey. Not a one-time compliance box at onboarding but a foundation that supports every downstream risk decision.

Most teams today rely on patchwork tools that create blind spots, or they force rigid, one-size-fits-all flows that add friction for good users. This is how fraud slips through while legitimate customers get frustrated.

Persona’s approach relies on deep signal diversity. Government IDs, biometrics, devices, emails, phone numbers, behavioral patterns, velocity checks, and dozens of third-party data sources. They share 50+ top risk signals for individual and business verification, and offer many more. This goes far beyond traditional identity verification that mostly centers on document checks.

Once you anchor on identity, it becomes clear that verification can’t live in a single part of the stack. It has to support the full customer journey. 

Identity and onboarding.

Login and account access. 

Transaction and payment risk. 

Data enrichment, case management, disputes, chargebacks, and even payouts and withdrawals. 

Each touchpoint becomes an opportunity to confirm trust without creating unnecessary friction.

That’s where workflow customization matters. With Persona, teams can design adaptive flows without pulling in heavy engineering resources. High-risk users can face deeper checks. Low-risk users move quickly. This reduces fraud while protecting the experience for legitimate customers.

Global coverage extends this philosophy. 

Verification works across more than 225 countries and territories, which is crucial for platforms that operate internationally. Regulations, document formats, and fraud patterns shift by region. Identity infrastructure needs to adapt with them.

And because verification has to interact with the rest of the stack, Persona integrates with CRMs, payment processors, fraud platforms, case management tools, and enrichment providers. Stripe and Plaid show up often. This positions Persona as identity infrastructure that supports every downstream risk decision, not a narrow point solution.

Persona’s customer base spans fast-growing fintechs, global marketplaces, and large enterprises that need to reduce fraud without damaging user experience. 

These are teams facing scale, increasing regulatory pressure, and rising abuse. Fraud, risk, compliance, product, and trust & safety all play a role. Identity verification cuts across each of these functions, so decisions are rarely made in a silo.

This mix of stakeholders shows up clearly in how Persona is deployed. 

Square uses Persona to streamline merchant onboarding while keeping bad actors out. Payment processors feel onboarding fraud acutely, so identity verification becomes core infrastructure rather than a back-office compliance step.

OpenAI relies on Persona for global automated screening across 225 countries and territories. 

AI platforms deal with extreme volumes of account creation attempts, including bots, resellers, and coordinated fraud rings. They need screening services that work instantly and worldwide without slowing down legitimate users.

Content-driven platforms bring different requirements. 

Playboy uses Persona to verify creators, meet regulatory obligations, and enforce age-appropriate environments. These flows go beyond traditional fraud prevention. They blend compliance, safety, and trust.

Brex shows how this plays out in financial services.

When launching Brex Cash, they needed a way to confirm customer identity across more than 100 countries while maintaining a conversion-optimized flow. Persona allowed them to validate government IDs at scale and automatically compare extracted ID data to existing account information. This helped Brex keep onboarding smooth for known customers while adding the necessary rigor for new ones.

Even identity leaders validate the approach. 

Okta chose Persona as its first identity proofing partner to strengthen workforce identity verification and pair it with phishing-resistant authentication. When a company that defines global identity best practices adopts a verification partner, it reinforces the idea that identity infrastructure must be modern, adaptable, and rooted in verified trust.

Legacy identity verification vendors focus primarily on document verification for compliance rather than comprehensive fraud prevention infrastructure. They check boxes for regulatory requirements but may lack the flexibility and user experience focus that platforms need.

Fraud detection platforms provide transaction monitoring and behavioral analytics but typically integrate with, rather than replace, identity verification. Persona is often bundled alongside these tools, positioning identity verification as complementary infrastructure.

Orchestration layers and case management tools help teams manage fraud workflows but don't provide identity verification capabilities. Persona integrates with these systems as the identity verification component.

Persona's positioning - Identity verification infrastructure that supports fraud prevention across the entire customer journey, not just compliance at onboarding. The customization focus and global coverage differentiate from one-size-fits-all legacy vendors.

Market timing factors:

Identity verification is shifting from a compliance task to core fraud infrastructure. 

As fraud becomes more advanced, teams are seeing the limits of relying only on transaction monitoring. If the identity layer is weak, everything built on top of it struggles.

Risk-based verification is becoming the default. 

Instead of treating every user the same, platforms are moving to dynamic flows that adjust based on real-time risk signals. This gives stronger fraud protection while keeping friction low for good users.

Verification also can’t stay fixed at onboarding. 

Identity trust changes. Accounts get taken over, credentials leak, and behavior evolves. Continuous verification across the customer journey is replacing point-in-time checks because it catches issues the original verification never could.

Global growth adds another layer. 

Operating across multiple countries means facing different documents, regulations, and fraud patterns. Platforms that solve this with unified infrastructure,not a patchwork of regional tools, gain a clear operational advantage.

This leads to the strategic question every operator has to answer. 

Are you still treating identity verification as a compliance requirement, or as the foundation of your fraud architecture? If your investment in transaction monitoring outweighs your investment in identity, you may be trying to solve fraud in the wrong order.

Persona represents the maturation of identity verification from compliance tooling to fraud prevention infrastructure. Their positioning challenges the assumption that sophisticated fraud prevention happens primarily at the transaction layer.

For platform operators - If your fraud prevention strategy focuses primarily on transaction monitoring and behavioral analytics while identity verification remains a basic compliance check, you're allowing fraudsters to establish a trusted presence before your sophisticated detection even activates.

Market maturity assessment - Established player (founded 2018) with significant enterprise deployments across regulated industries (Square, Robinhood, SoFi) and high-profile platforms (OpenAI, Okta). The customer diversity, from fintech to content platforms to workforce identity, suggests broad product-market fit.

Investment thesis - Platforms that treat identity verification as fraud prevention infrastructure rather than compliance overhead will have significant advantages in both fraud prevention effectiveness and user experience. 

As organized fraud rings become more sophisticated, the identity verification foundation becomes more critical.

Based on my research, Persona is addressing a fundamental sequencing problem in fraud prevention. The tendency to invest heavily in detecting fraudulent behavior while underinvesting in verifying who users actually are in the first place.

Where does identity verification fit in your fraud prevention architecture? Hit reply and let me know if you're seeing transaction monitoring catch fraud that stronger identity verification would have prevented at onboarding.

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