ACI Worldwide and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan have announced the integration of Kinexys Liink's Confirm application into ACI Worldwide's Fraud and Financial Crime solution. The move embeds account and payee verification directly into payment workflows, allowing financial institutions to validate payment details before a transaction is initiated across multiple payment rails and geographies.
The announcement reflects the broader challenge facing banks and payment providers as real-time payment volumes grow. According to ACI's Scamscope report, authorised push payment (APP) scams currently generate USD 4.4 billion in losses annually worldwide, a figure projected to reach USD 7.6 billion by 2028. Some 63% of those losses are occurring on real-time payment rails today, with that share expected to approach 80% within the next three years.
A central complication for fraud prevention in this context is the irrevocable nature of instant payments. Unlike traditional transfers, funds sent over real-time rails cannot be recalled once settled, which renders post-transaction monitoring insufficient as a standalone control. This has increased industry pressure to shift verification upstream, confirming account ownership and payee details before money leaves the account.
Embedding verification into the payment flow
Kinexys Liink operates as a bank-led, peer-to-peer blockchain-based data sharing network supporting account validation in more than 70 countries. It is designed to be payment rail-agnostic, enabling institutions to share payee verification requests and responses through a single network connection while maintaining data control for participants.
The Confirm application, now integrated into ACI's platform, checks that an account exists, is open, and matches the intended recipient prior to payment initiation. ACI embeds this capability alongside fraud decisioning across ACH, wire, and instant payment types within ACI Connetic, its cloud-native platform, which brings account-to-account payments, card payments, and AI-driven fraud prevention into a single modular architecture.
The general manager of Kinexys Liink stated that the integration is intended to help institutions meet account validation requirements and adapt to a rapidly changing regulatory and operational landscape. A company official at ACI Worldwide noted that when payments settle in real time, verification must equally occur in real time, before the transaction, to give banks the ability to intervene before fraud takes place.
The integration addresses a structural gap in how many institutions currently approach fraud: reliance on fragmented, channel-specific tools that do not apply consistent controls across payment types. By unifying verification and fraud decisioning within a single enterprise platform, the collaboration aims to simplify compliance as regulatory expectations around account validation continue to evolve across markets.
