Ascend North America 2025:
Innovating together

Ascend North America 2025 brought together the ecommerce community to celebrate innovation, foster collaboration, and showcase ingenuity. With a spotlight on uniting North American leaders in the fight against fraud and driving ecommerce growth, the event was a hub of transformative ideas and strategies. For those who couldn’t join us live, here’s a recap of the presentations that shaped our discussions in New York.

Key highlights

Uncharted opportunities in today’s ecommerce landscape

In his opening address, Eido Gal, Riskified Co-founder and CEO, set the stage for Ascend by outlining the growth of ecommerce, the worldwide expansion of Riskified’s merchant network, and the significant challenges fraud poses to merchant growth and profitability.

• Ecommerce growth: Despite uncertainties, ecommerce is projected to hit almost $7 trillion in 2025, with significant potential for merchants. Riskified’s merchant network is also expanding across various sectors, particularly travel, ticketing, and remittance.
• Fraud challenges: Fraud, including CNP fraud, policy abuse, and false declines, costs merchants more than $450 billion annually and continues to pose a significant threat to ecommerce growth. AI and sophisticated tactics are escalating these risks.
• Collaboration & innovation: Riskified merchants are not just customers – they are co-creators of solutions that benefit the greater industry. Through these deep partnerships, Riskified’s platform has evolved to cover the full spectrum of fraud and abuse, with a focus on accuracy and flexibility. Riskified’s innovation roadmap includes new hands-on tools and intelligence to give merchants more visibility, control, and insights to manage risks effectively.

Collaborative fraud prevention and adaptable solutions

Danielle Dzbanek, Senior Director of Global Merchant Health at Riskified, highlighted that combating fraud effectively requires a collective mindset. Drawing an analogy from Formula1 rivalries joining forces to protect mutual interests, she noted that fraud — as both a service and industry — requires a similar big-picture approach. Fraud detection across networks, rather than isolated merchants, is becoming imperative.

With AI’s rise in fraud, fraudsters are no longer targeting just one company; it’s an industry-wide threat. Danielle revealed how fraudsters leverage AI and dark web services to launch sophisticated, large-scale attacks. Learn why collective action and deep data insights are crucial for ecommerce to outpace these evolving fraud rings.

The cost of omnichannel fraud and returns

The rising tide of returns and policy abuse poses a significant challenge for modern retailers. Omnichannel fraud surfaced as a key topic, including in a discussion led by Riskified Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Otto alongside Pedro Ramos, Chief Revenue Officer of Appriss Retail. Exploring the escalating $103 billion problem, Jeff highlighted the tension between protecting good customers and detecting fraudsters operating as highly sophisticated networks.

The two delved into the escalating costs of omnichannel returns and outlined innovative approaches to tackle this complex issue. They explained how traditional, rigid return policies can alienate up to 70% of loyal customers, while the rise of “refund-as-a-service” operations has made return and refund fraud larger than payment fraud. The discussion also addressed the concept of “identity clustering” through advanced AI and graph technology, allowing merchants to link suspicious activity across fragmented data points (e.g., just 600 identities cost one merchant over $4 million). This capability enables friction-free experiences for good customers and adds additional verification for “marginal” ones. It reduces overall returns by 8-12% and saves an additional 8% in frictional costs, ultimately boosting profitability and ensuring consistent fraud protection across all customer touchpoints.

Innovative ways to boost ecommerce conversion while managing risk

Ecommerce businesses constantly face the challenge of boosting conversion rates while mitigating risk. False declines, often due to overly cautious fraud rules or an abundance of friction, alienate good customers and lead to lost sales and reputational damage. In this session, Riskified Director of Product Marketing Ephraim Rinsky covered ways in which checkout can move beyond simple “yes/no” fraud decisions with the help of a sophisticated toolbox to apply the right amount of additional verification at the right time.

Through a personal anecdote, Rinsky illustrated the “gap” about a false decline he experienced while ordering flowers. This scenario, common to many consumers, results in:

• Lost sales: The immediate loss of a transaction.
• Wasted marketing spend: All the investment to bring a customer to checkout becomes futile.
• Lost customer lifetime value: Customers, once declined, are likely to take their future business elsewhere.
• Reputational damage: False declines can lead to public complaints and harm brand perception.

Ephy further explained that good customers are often falsely declined for three main reasons:

1. Internal false declines by merchant fraud teams, who mistakenly flag legitimate orders as risky;
2. Imprecise friction, where blanket security measures like mandatory CVV codes inconvenience genuine buyers;
3. Bank authorization failures, as risk-averse banks frequently decline legitimate transactions due to limited data.

All three factors collectively hinder conversion rates.

To combat this, Riskified introduced Adaptive Checkout. The solution reimagines payment and return experiences by offering “smart friction” only when necessary. Known legitimate customers are easily approved, while borderline cases face tailored security measures.This selective verification for at-risk customers was credited with achieving a 90% behavioral correction rate, preserving lifetime value without resorting to total declines. This surgical use of data makes it possible to simultaneously delight loyal customers while strategically deterring abusers.

Guesswork vs data-driven decisions: Creating seamless customer experiences

Acquiring new customers is costly, but assessing their true intent upon first interaction poses a significant industry challenge. Without historical data, businesses struggle to differentiate loyal shoppers from potential policy abusers, leading to inconsistent service and revenue leakage. In this session, Maria Vargas VP, Customer Service, Rue Gilt Groupe, explores how identity-aware intelligence and advanced data analysis can predict future customer behavior.

By understanding a new customer’s likely lifetime value and risk profile, companies like RGG can tailor experiences, offering instant resolutions to good customers while strategically applying friction or denying claims from known bad actors, transforming customer service into a powerful defense against abuse.

Maria’s presentation underscored an indispensable shift: identity-aware intelligence moves beyond simple automation to enable a deeper understanding of customers, allowing businesses to protect themselves from abuse while simultaneously delighting their most valuable patrons at scale.

Fighting scams at scale: Exposing the industrialization of fraud

In this session, Riskified Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Otto delved into the industrialized criminal ecosystem. Jeff explored how scams are no longer small-time operations; rather, they have become highly organized, global criminal enterprises that exploit human beings and defraud consumers out of billions.

How to bridge the merchant-issuer gap with real-time intelligence

Despite advancements in fraud prevention, chargebacks remain a costly and growing challenge for many merchants. The core issue lies in consumer behavior: half of cardholders dispute transactions directly with their bank, bypassing the merchant entirely due to convenience. This widespread practice leads to significant losses, operational costs, and damaged merchant reputations.

Speakers from Riskified’s partner Ethoca and merchant Super.com highlighted in this session why intelligence sharing between issuers and merchants is crucial. By enabling merchants to receive early warnings of impending disputes, they can proactively refund, prevent product shipments, and leverage vital data to enhance their fraud strategies and boost overall authorization rates.

Sarah Boehmer

Super.com

We were able to set some thresholds and rules for Ethoca in a really flexible way, which helped us reduce our MasterCard chargeback ratio by 20% quickly, even though our business was growing.”

Titan Talk: From cost center to growth driver – A CFO’s perspective on fraud

Presented by Riskified each year, the Titans of Ecommerce Awards recognize standout individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership in combating ecommerce fraud and driven business success. This year, Chris Hummer, CFO of TicketNetwork, was named the 2025 Titan of North America. Chris’ remarkable resilience and ingenuity have enabled him to navigate complex challenges with distinction. Riskified’s CFO, Agi Dotcheva, joined Chris to discuss his professional journey, career highlights, and lessons learned along the way.

Watch as Chris shares his insights on transforming fraud into a strategic business advantage.

Ready to explore how these insights can drive your business forward?

Speak with a Riskified expert to dig deeper into the experiences and strategies of the top minds in ecommerce fraud prevention.

Speak with an expert

About Ascend

In its eighth year, Ascend is the premier summit for ecommerce risk management, bringing together industry leaders and fraud experts to discuss the evolving challenges and opportunities in the world of online businesses.

This year, Riskified’s global event series takes place in six locations. Each gathering features inspiring keynotes, panel discussions, and insights into tackling fraud while unlocking growth in ecommerce.