ATDATA

We spoke with Diarmuid Thoma, Head of Fraud Prevention and Data Strategy at AtData, about how financial institutions can leverage AI-powered email intelligence to stay ahead of evolving threats. With over 24 years of experience building fraud-prevention programmes for global organisations including Facebook, TransUnion and as a founding member of Trustev, Diarmuid brings unique insights into the intersection of identity verification, regulatory compliance and customer experience. engagement addresses are highly correlated with elevated risk, while longestablished, actively used addresses provide strong evidence of legitimacy. Those signals help detect synthetic identities, spot account takeover attempts and reduce losses from promotional and transaction fraud – often earlier and more efficiently than transaction-only signals.

Because email is widely captured during onboarding and naturally integrates with common flows like password recovery and notifications, it enables low-friction defenses that preserve customer experience. When combined with privacy-first machine learning models and regulatory-aligned handling, email intelligence becomes a scalable, cost-effective cornerstone for securing digital finance platforms.

Q. WHY ARE TRADITIONAL KYC PROCESSES INSUFFICIENT IN TODAY’ S DIGITAL-FIRST ENVIRONMENT? Traditional KYC processes struggle in today’ s digital-first world because they are largely manual, slow, resourceintensive and vulnerable to security risks as well as oversight. In contrast, email and its subsequent characteristics have emerged as a crucial identity and communication layer, enabling faster, more secure and scalable verification and onboarding.

Traditional KYC has several critical weaknesses: manual reviews slow onboarding, raise costs and create operational inefficiency.

Q. WHY IS THE EMAIL ADDRESS CONSIDERED A FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENT FOR SECURITY IN DIGITAL FINANCE? The email address is a foundational security signal in digital finance because it combines persistence with observable behavior. It’ s both an enduring identifier and a window into how an account is actually used. That combination makes email intelligence uniquely powerful for fraud prevention, authentication and trust decisions at scale.

As one of the most stable identifiers a person keeps, an email carries contextual signals that reveal credibility: age, domain reputation, whether it is disposable or role-based, aliasing and forwarding behavior and historical engagement such as open and click patterns. New, short-lived or lowfintechmagazine. com 137