2025 GLOBAL RISK DECISIONING SURVEY
2025: THE YEAR OF INTELLIGENT DECISIONING
Effective decisioning has never been more critical. Our survey of nearly 200 global financial leaders reveals that innovation is no longer a luxury - it’s a necessity.
Our findings underscore that key challenges persist - nearly half of respondents cite managing credit risk and preventing fraud as their top concerns. Yet institutions are responding decisively, with over 60% of respondents prioritizing investments in AI. Why? Because AI doesn’t just help you stay ahead of fraudsters - it can also empower you to adapt to evolving regulations, maximize growth opportunities, and enhance customer experiences.
One striking takeaway from the survey is the inefficiency of disjointed decisioning systems. Over 50% of respondents identified siloed data and fragmented processes as significant pain points, underscoring the need for a unified platform approach. A single decisioning platform optimizes your approach to risk mitigation and fraud protection, but also provides an opportunity to maximize value across the entire customer lifecycle. By streamlining operations you can unlock real-time decisioning and hyper-personalization, the features most prioritized by financial leaders.
Data orchestration emerged as another critical theme. More than half of respondents identified the integration of data sources into decisioning processes as their biggest challenge, reinforcing the need for high-quality, integrated data to power more effective decisions.
The AI Revolution: Moving Beyond the Hype
Today, there’s immense pressure to implement AI. When surveyed, respondents expressed a clear need for AI tools that offer tangible benefits. Benefits like automated model tuning, AI-powered performance recommendations, explainability and transparency, and optimized decisions. AI helps to empower non-technical teams to take the reins, bridging the gap between technical innovation and strategic execution.
However, implementing AI is not without its hurdles - many of those organizations under pressure are either unsure of how to adopt AI, or fearful of not getting it right. Integration challenges, data quality, and upfront costs are barriers that can’t be ignored. Organizations must approach AI adoption with a robust roadmap, ensuring that their infrastructure, talent, and governance align with their ambitions - because we all want to be one of the organizations that succeed where so many early adopters have failed.
A Call to Action for Financial Services Providers
The future of decisioning isn’t about patchwork fixes - it’s about cohesive strategies that address challenges holistically. To thrive in 2025 and beyond, financial services providers must:
◦ Invest in unified platforms to eliminate silos and inefficiencies
◦ Leverage AI intelligently, focusing on tools that offer clear ROI and operational impact
◦ Prioritize data integration and quality as foundational elements of decisioning success
Read on for all of the detailed insights in this year’s survey.
WHAT ARE YOUR TOP THREE RISK DECISIONING CHALLENGES?
Nearly half of all respondents say their biggest risk decisioning challenges are managing credit risk and detecting and preventing fraud. Compared to last year’s survey results, managing risk remains the top challenge, while detecting fraud has increased from 43% to 48%. Financial institutions must adopt advanced AI technologies, capable of tackling both credit risk and fraud - and bridging the gap between teams. Organizations should prioritize improving data access and modernizing legacy systems to enhance decisioning processes.
WHERE DO YOU PLAN TO INVEST IN 2025 AND BEYOND?
Over half of all respondents plan to invest in risk decisioning solutions and AI/embedded intelligence in 2025 and beyond, highlighting that organizations recognize the critical role of AI in optimizing risk decisioning and fraud prevention and accelerating opportunities. Likewise, investment in data orchestration and integrated solutions will enable more seamless decision-making and better prevent fraud.
Nearly 60% of respondents find it difficult to deploy and maintain risk decisioning models, while only 5% say it's very easy to do so, potentially leading to inaccurate risk assessments, and missed revenue opportunities. Low-code platforms and robust automation can simplify model deployment, while improving accessibility and self-reliance will streamline operations.
WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES TO HAVING SEPARATE DECISIONING SYSTEMS ACROSS THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE?
Over half of respondents say the biggest challenges to having separate decisioning systems across the customer lifecycle are the lack of seamless data flow and unified insights, and operational inefficiencies. Adopting unified platforms that can handle end-to-end decisioning is key to breaking down silos and will enable financial services providers to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience.
WHAT ARE YOUR TOP PRIORITIES IN YOUR CUSTOMER/ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT DECISIONING SOLUTIONS?
Top priorities in customer/account management solutions are real-time, event-driven decisioning (65%), eliminating friction across the customer lifecycle (44%), and increasing customer lifetime value (44%). Built-in testing and simulation of model performance is also a key priority for over a third of respondents, allowing you to optimize model performance before and after deployment. With an agile, proactive decisioning solution for customer management, you can enable frictionless customer experiences that allow for more personalization and increased customer lifetime value.
WHICH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FEATURES WOULD PROVIDE YOU THE MOST VALUE?
Institutions value AI that provides actionable insights and enables agility.
Democratizing AI through low-code tools can accelerate adoption and drive better outcomes. Over half of respondents said the top three AI features that would provide the most value are: the ability to make streamlined strategy decisions (55%), AI-powered performance improvement recommendations (55%), and the ability to automatically tune models to make better, more accurate decisions (53%).
AI-powered performance improvement recommendations 55% The
53%
Ability to automatically tune models to make better, more accurate decisions 45%
Generate, deploy, and monitor machine learning models without relying on data scientists 39%
More personalized offers to customers 55%
Ability to make updates through simulations 37%
WHAT ARE YOUR BIGGEST BARRIERS TO IMPLEMENTING AI IN YOUR DECISIONING?
Financial services providers struggle with data quality, inhibiting AI implementation. Approximately half of respondents say the biggest barriers to implementing AI in decisioning include data quality and availability (52%), initial costs and/or unclear ROI (48%), and integration challenges (47%). To overcome data challenges and internal objections, start with AI projects that can show a quick ROI to successfully build further implementations on.
CHALLENGES YOU FACE WITH YOUR APPLICATION FRAUD SOLUTION?
37%
WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST DATA CHALLENGE?
29% 18% 53%
Being able to easily integrate data sources into decisioning processes
Determining which data providers/sources are the right fit for decisioning needs
Accessing alternative data sources
Data challenges are a common theme across the customer lifecycle. Over half of respondents agree the biggest data challenge they face is being able to easily integrate data sources into decisioning processes, while nearly a third of respondents agree that the most important aspect to delivering a comprehensive fraud strategy is the ability to break down data silos between fraud and credit risk teams.
The biggest challenges faced with application fraud solutions include effective data orchestration, the ability to easily ingest and integrate new data sources, and using AI for fraud prevention. Institutions need platforms that simplify data ingestion and enhance AI-driven fraud detection. Flexibility in modifying workflows is essential for addressing dynamic fraud scenarios.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Provenir surveyed nearly 200 key decision makers at financial services providers globally, including Chief Risk Officers, CEOs, VPs, Senior Directors, Managing Directors, Decision Scientists, Heads of Risk, IT, Fraud and more.
North America
Latin America
EMEA | APAC
ABOUT US
Provenir is shaping the future of risk decisioning with AI, offering a single AI Decisioning Platform for credit risk, fraud, and compliance across the customer lifecycle. Provenir’s AI Decisioning solutions combine everything financial services providers need to create frictionless onboarding and customer engagement experiences that optimize value across the customer. We work with financial services providers in more than 60 countries globally, and process more than 4 billion transactions annually.
