ChainIT and RS Software have formed a product alliance aimed at bringing risk-based authentication to account-to-account (A2A) payments, addressing a long-standing gap in the instant payments ecosystem as adoption accelerates through networks such as the Federal Reserve's FedNow service and The Clearing House's RTP network.

While card payments have benefited from a shared authentication framework—3-D Secure—for roughly two decades, instant payment systems have lacked a comparable industry-wide standard. Regulatory mandates such as Europe's PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication requirements have driven authentication investment, but no interoperable protocol analogous to 3-D Secure has emerged for real-time bank transfers. These payments settle within seconds and cannot be reversed, making robust fraud prevention especially critical.

Fraud losses on bank-transfer networks now reach into the billions annually, and transaction volume continues to grow as more banks join instant payment networks and merchants increasingly adopt pay-by-bank options at checkout. According to the FTC, reported consumer fraud losses exceeded $12.5 billion in 2024, representing a 25 percent year-over-year increase, with bank transfers accounting for greater losses than any other payment method. In the UK, the Payment Systems Regulator's mandatory APP fraud reimbursement scheme took effect in October 2024, shifting reimbursement responsibility onto payment providers and intensifying demand for real-time fraud prevention tools.

Two dominant fraud categories—account takeover and authorized push payment (APP) scams—both exploit the same vulnerability: identity is verified once at onboarding and then assumed to remain valid. The ChainIT–RS Software alliance addresses this by continuously evaluating identity and fraud risk on every individual transaction in milliseconds.

RS Software's fraud and risk platform, RS IntelliEdge™, scores each payment using behavioral, device, and contextual signals. ChainIT provides biometric identity verification and Validated Data Tokens—cryptographically anchored credentials that establish who authorized a payment and whether they possessed the authority to do so. When the combined risk score crosses a defined threshold, the financial institution's own policies determine the response: requesting additional verification, holding the payment, or allowing it to proceed.

The framework also extends to business payments, binding each transaction to the underlying agreement that authorizes it and flagging counterparty risks that onboarding processes alone may not detect. Financial institutions retain final decision-making authority throughout. The system supplies a risk score, a plain-language rationale, and a tamper-evident audit record.

"Identity verification is the primary gateway for preventing fraud, and Fraud Prevention has become the Core of Trust in payments. We are excited to partner with ChainIT to provide integrated front-line attack in this multi-billion-dollar market opportunity," said Raj Jain, CEO of RS Software.

"Our role is to prove who authorized a payment and preserve the evidence in a form that supports dispute resolution," said Jeremy Blackburn, CEO of ChainIT. "RS Software brings the risk engine that turns that proof into action."