Fraud is changing. Trust must too.
How LexisNexis Risk Solutions helps organisations detect and prevent fraud
Kimberly Sutherland answers five questions on the future of digital trust.
The way consumers interact with businesses is evolving and increasing in complexity. As digital interactions continue to grow across more devices and channels, they create more opportunities for fraud. Organisations need to recognise trusted behaviour, detect anomalies in real time and establish trust across every interaction.
Kimberly Sutherland, Vice President and Global Head of Fraud and Identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, explains how connected intelligence, layered fraud prevention and the LexisNexis Risk Intelligence Network help organisations reduce fraud while delivering fast, frictionless customer experiences.
Note: The insights shared below are based on Kimberly Sutherland's presentation at the RELX Business Services Investor Seminar in May 2026. The format has been adapted into a Q&A format for readability.
About Kimberly Sutherland
Kimberly Sutherland is Vice President and Global Head of Fraud and Identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. With more than 20 years' experience at the company, she leads the commercial strategy for the global fraud and identity portfolio, helping organisations around the world strengthen digital trust and protect customer interactions.
1How is AI changing the fraud landscape?
The way consumers interact with businesses is evolving and increasing in complexity. During a single interaction, a consumer may log into an account on their phone, move from a mobile app to a website, issue a real-time payment and initiate an account-to-account transfer. We are seeing a growing number of interactions across more devices and channels, from mobile browsers and digital wallets to the emergence of agentic commerce.
This growth means more opportunity for fraud.
Recognising trusted behaviour and detecting anomalies in real time, across every device and every channel, is no longer optional. It is a baseline expectation.
Watch Kimberly explain how AI is reshaping the fraud landscape and why organisations need to establish trust across every interaction
2How can organisations strengthen security without creating more friction for customers?
Vulnerability to fraud attacks persists across the entire consumer lifecycle. LexisNexis Risk Solutions helps customers reduce fraud by layering defences at each of those touchpoints.
The first layer is 'Digital and Identity Assessment', which uses device, location, behavioural, bot and agent intelligence to establish trust from the very first signal. In addition to the basics like identity attributes such as email address, name, and phone number they're also verified.
The second layer applies 'Decision Analytics', where adaptive fraud models, machine learning and orchestration identify anomalies and velocity patterns in real time.
The third layer adds 'Authentication', ranging from passive methods that bind a trusted device to active methods including biometrics and document authentication.
The fourth layer, 'Investigation and Review', closes the loop with forensics, case management and even the incorporation of fraud feedback.
We leverage an integrated platform for the dynamic and coordinated use of these solutions. Underpinning every layer is the LexisNexis Risk Intelligence Network, ensuring every signal adds the required context to assess risk for every interaction.
How these capabilities are deployed is determined by the customer. This enables a fast, frictionless experience for the vast majority of low-risk consumers and transactions, while providing strong protection when there are signals of fraud.
3What happens behind the scenes during a trusted digital interaction?
A consumer transaction can seem very simple. But behind that moment, thousands of data signals are being collected and analysed. Fully automated risk decisions are running in real time, and fraud risk models are scoring the interaction. This is done in approximately 85 milliseconds, and more than 400 million times a day.
At the core of that decision engine are three fundamental questions:
Who is this?
Does this identity, device, behaviour and combination of signals have any history within our network? Identity recognition is the foundation of trust.
Can they be trusted?
Are the attributes accurate? Is there any suspicious activity associated with this behaviour, this device or this identity? And critically, is this person a victim themselves, potentially being manipulated without even knowing it?
Do we need more proof?
Ambiguous signals require further verification.
Every digital identity creates data in our network - an email address, a device and how someone interacts with it, a phone number, a billing address, a payment card and a location. In isolation, each of these signals tells a partial story. But connected together, they can reveal something far more powerful: a trusted identity.
4How is a trusted digital identity established?
A typical user has one to two email addresses, two to four devices and two to four payment cards. When something shifts - a new device, an unfamiliar location, automated filling of identity attributes, or behavioural signals that suggest the user is being coerced, which is a hallmark of sophisticated fraud - our network recognises those moments.
One example is a consumer logging into their account.
As soon as the user lands on the page, we begin building risk context using device, network and hardware intelligence. In near real time, tens of milliseconds, all of these signals are evaluated behind the scenes, with no impact on the user experience.
What’s important for our customers isn’t just the decision, it's understanding why that decision was made. That's where reason codes come in. Reason codes provide transparent, explainable insight into what contributed to trusting this user.
In this example, multiple positive signals come together:
- A recognised user logging in from a known device.
- Established historical behaviour over time - not a one-off interaction.
- An identity trusted across the digital network.
Together, these signals create high confidence that this is a legitimate, low-risk user.
Now compare that with a consusmer registering an account with one of our customers. This is the customer’s first time seeing this consumer, and the only data they have are an email address and a device. On its own, an email address and a device aren't enough to confidently assess risk.
With our network, we layer in significantly more intelligence. Through our solution, that same email is seen transacting successfully elsewhere - linked to known devices, established payment behaviour and consistent digital and behavioural patterns across our network and other customers.
Watch Kimberly explain how LexisNexis Risk Solutions establishes trust by connecting digital identity signals in real time
When looking at the same flow, but with a bad actor – here, a fraudster is reusing stolen credentials at scale. On the surface, these look like separate transactions - different emails, different devices, all appearing unrelated.
But our network and sophisticated linking resolves these events into a single identity. Not by depending on the device, but by linking across email, location, and behavioural patterns across our network. Even as the fraudster rotates devices or spoofs credentials, the identity holds.
These devices and emails are no longer isolated events. They become a singular view into a customer’s digital journey.
5How does LexisNexis Risk Solutions help organisations detect fraud that individual businesses might otherwise miss?
One of our banking customers, using our layered fraud solutions, noticed a bad actor trying to use stolen credentials to access an account. The same device made multiple attempts to log into the account using different stolen credentials within a short period.
In real time, we connected the device, the behaviour and network intelligence, and flagged the behaviour as suspicious and identified it as inconsistent with a genuine user. We immediately stopped the fraud attempts and our customer avoided any associated losses.
The scale and visibility of the LexisNexis Risk Intelligence Network then enabled us to link that one incident to multiple connected devices and prior fraud activity instantly.
From a single suspicious device, we identified:
- 26 additional high-risk devices
- 18 further fraud events
- Activity across 18 different organisations
The result was that we were able to stop a coordinated fraud ring moving across institutions and channels, and additional customers were able to quickly prevent losses.
No single institution could see the full picture on its own. However, one incident helped prevent fraud across our entire network.
This example demonstrates how the scale and global reach of our network delivers significant, measurable value to our customers.
As digital interactions become more complex, organisations need to establish trust across every interaction.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions helps organisations recognise trusted behaviour, detect anomalies in real time and make higher-confidence decisions through connected intelligence and the LexisNexis Risk Intelligence Network.