Catching fraud used to be the finish line. Not anymore. 

Our latest consumer survey found that ~70% of consumers now say how their financial institution handles resolution matters more than whether the fraud was caught in the first place, and that’s up 7.9 points from last year.  

I’ve spent years in fraud operations, and this stat didn’t surprise me one bit.  

Why “fixing it” now outweighs “catching it” 

I’ve talked about the two “moments of truth” that define the banking relationship: getting approved for an account and getting help when something goes wrong. What’s changed is how much weight that second moment now carries. 

A few things pushed it there. The 2008 banking crisis and the creation of the CFPB reset public expectations because people learned that the system, and the government, would fight on their behalf. Then COVID accelerated e-commerce, where merchant-liable transactions made refunds easier to get and trained consumers to expect quick resolution as the norm. 

I see older consumers more willing to shrug off an occasional problem, while younger consumers expect swift justice. Layering in generational attitudes, the rising bar for resolution starts to make a lot of sense. 

The liability question gets messier with scams 

Here’s where it gets counterintuitive: 32.5% of consumers told us they should bear the loss when asked who’s liable for scams, compared to just 13.6% who pointed to their bank. 

That number isn’t really about fraud. It’s about the guilt that comes with being an active participant in the transaction. Whether it’s a Zelle payment or an ACH transfer, people who clicked “yes” and sent the money themselves are more likely to internalize the blame, even when they were manipulated into it by increasingly sophisticated, AI-generated scam tactics. 

I think it’s a psychological pattern as much as a financial one: people who realize, after the fact, that they should have seen the warning signs tend to accept the loss as a kind of penance rather than fight for reimbursement. 

Everyone’s a target. Most just haven’t lost money yet 

One more number worth sitting with: 4 in 5 consumers have been exposed to a scam attempt. Most didn’t lose money, but nearly all of them have seen the text, the email, or the DM. 

I think that universal exposure is exactly why so many consumers feel responsible when a scam succeeds. If everyone’s getting targeted and most people dodge it, falling for one can feel like a personal failure rather than bad luck. 

Resolution is only as good as the ecosystem behind it 

Here’s the reality: no single institution resolves a scam or fraud claim on its own anymore. The scams have gotten too sophisticated, and the transaction rails move too fast for any one team or one system to catch everything in isolation. 

That’s why the institutions doing this well lean on an integrated stack: identity verification tools that confirm who actually authorized a transaction, case management platforms that keep the investigation and the customer communication in sync, and data-sharing networks that flag a scam pattern seen at one institution before it hits the next. When those pieces are stitched together well, “getting help when something goes wrong” stops being a slow, manual process and starts looking like the fast resolution consumers now expect. 

This is also where I think institutions get the most leverage from their technology partners. The right partnership isn’t just plugging a gap, it’s compressing the distance between “something went wrong” and “we fixed it,” which is exactly the moment our data says consumers are judging you on. 

Get the full data behind these findings and more on how consumer expectations are reshaping fraud strategy. Download: 2026 Trust in Banking Research Report