The Total Economic Impact™ Of The TransUnion Synthetic Fraud Solution

TransUnion’s Synthetic Fraud Solution helps organizations identify applications that may be associated with synthetic identities during the onboarding and account origination process. The solution provides risk scores that they can incorporate into existing fraud, identity verification, and underwriting workflows to support more informed decision-making. By helping organizations distinguish higher-risk applications from legitimate customers, the model can support fraud detection efforts while reducing manual review reliance.

TransUnion commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Synthetic Fraud Solution.¹ The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Synthetic Fraud Solution on their organizations.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed four decision-makers with experience using Synthetic Fraud Solution. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organization: a North American financial services and lending organization that serves consumers through digital and indirect lending channels.

Interviewees said that before using Synthetic Fraud Solution, their organizations relied on traditional credit bureau data, manual reviews, rules-based controls, identity verification checks, and internal fraud processes that were not specifically designed to identify increasingly sophisticated synthetic identities. In many cases, these approaches made it difficult to consistently distinguish fraudulent applicants from legitimate customers, resulting in greater manual effort, operational inefficiencies, fraud exposure uncertainties, and difficulty balancing fraud detection with customer experience.

After investing in Synthetic Fraud Solution, the interviewees’ organizations gained additional intelligence to identify potentially fraudulent applications during account origination and onboarding workflows, enabling fraud teams to focus reviews on higher-risk applicants while supporting more informed decision-making. Interviewees reported improved fraud detection capabilities, reduced fraud losses, lower manual review burdens, stronger compliance and governance practices, and increased ability to confidently approve legitimate customers.

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

• Reduced synthetic fraud losses, worth $245,000 over three years. Synthetic fraud intelligence helps the composite organization identify higher-risk applications during account origination, before extending credit and incurring losses. The composite organization processes 525,000 applications annually, experiences a 0.25% loss-generating synthetic fraud incidence rate, and avoids 5% of potential synthetic fraud losses that would otherwise occur.

• Reduced fraud operations effort by 20%, worth $117,000 over three years. Improved fraud intelligence helps the composite organization focus manual reviews on higher-risk applications. The organization reduces manual review volume by 20%, allowing fraud analysts to redirect time from lower-value manual review activities to higher-value fraud analysis, investigation, and risk management work.

• Generated incremental profit through improved legitimate application conversion, worth $499,000 over three years. More accurate fraud decisioning enables the composite organization to avoid unnecessarily declining approximately 1,575 legitimate applicants annually. These applications are ultimately approved and funded, generating incremental revenue and profit while the organization maintains appropriate fraud controls.

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

• Improved compliance with identity verification requirements. Synthetic fraud intelligence provides an additional layer of information that supports customer identification, know your customer (KYC), customer identification program (CIP), and broader fraud risk management activities. For the composite organization, these capabilities strengthen identity verification processes and increase confidence in customer onboarding decisions while maintaining fraud controls.

• Improved fraud governance and auditability. Synthetic fraud scoring gives the composite organization a more structured approach to identifying, classifying, reviewing, and documenting applications associated with potential synthetic fraud risk. This visibility supports more consistent investigations, stronger oversight, targeted higher-risk application analysis, and improved ongoing fraud management processes.

• Increased organizational awareness of synthetic fraud risks. The solution helps the composite organization improve its understanding of synthetic fraud techniques and evolving fraud patterns. Greater awareness supports employee education, strengthens fraud and underwriting decision-making, and helps teams more effectively identify and respond to emerging threats.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

• Synthetic Fraud Solution volume-based costs, with a three-year PV of $114,000. The composite organization incurs costs based on transaction volume and applicable pricing. Forrester annualizes the modeled cost based on the composite organization’s application screening volume. Customer agreements may include minimum volume requirements, and actual pricing and commercial terms may vary.

• Implementation, integration, and setup, with a three-year PV of $50,000. The composite organization incurs a one-time cost for its internal and, where applicable, third-party resources to implement and integrate Synthetic Fraud Solution within existing fraud review and account origination workflows. The modeled cost reflects business and technical analysis, workflow configuration and integration, testing and validation, governance and compliance review, and user enablement and deployment support.

• Ongoing administration, with a three-year PV of $67,000. The composite organization dedicates fraud analyst and manager resources to monitor solution performance and operational outcomes, maintain workflow configurations, support recurring reporting, coordinate operational updates, and provide periodic management oversight.

• Fraud policy management, with a three-year PV of $55,000. The composite organization dedicates fraud and risk management resources to review fraud strategies and emerging risks, assess decisioning thresholds and exception policies, maintain policy documentation, and support cross-functional risk, compliance, and governance reviews.

The financial analysis that is based on the interviews found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $861,000 over three years versus costs of $285,000, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $576,000 and an ROI of 202%.