Ascend 2026 Europe recap: Intelligence in motion

As criminals use generative AI to scale their operations and exploit high transaction volume and new payment vectors, the European ecommerce community is at a pivotal moment. Online payment fraud losses worldwide are forecast to grow at an +18% CAGR by the end of the decade. Ascend 2026 brought together professionals from across Europe to confront the issues and opportunities ahead, as projected global online retail sales are set to approach $8 trillion by 2027.

Ascend 2026 unveiled innovations and insights to empower merchants to adapt, giving fraud and customer experience teams more AI, more risk intelligence, and more control.

For those who couldn’t join us or want to revisit essential sessions, here are some key topics and resources from London.

The highlights

Keynote 2026: AI that protects, predicts, and performs

In this year’s opening address, Riskified Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Otto examined how digital commerce is entering a new era where intelligence must move faster than fraud and operate across the entire customer journey, not just at checkout.

He unveiled how Riskified’s AI-driven behavioral intelligence and pre-checkout innovations are taking fraud management from point-in-time decisions to continuous, autonomous protection. With pre-checkout behavioral intelligence, real-time approvals, policy controls, and post-transaction protection, Riskified is empowering merchants to stop fraud earlier, reduce friction for good customers, and drive measurable business impact with innovations that include:

• AI-based Explainability that helps merchants understand the ‘why’ behind decisions across the entire store
• Identity Explore to unmask true shopper identity
• Decision Studio, which enables merchants to apply their own business logic and then confidently simulate, test, and deploy

Read more about Riskified’s AI-powered tools here.

Beyond the transaction: The shift to network intelligence

In Europe and around the world, fraud has outgrown the systems originally designed to stop it. The traditional “snapshot” approach — evaluating transactions in isolation — is not only outdated, but also actively risky in today’s environment. As generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for fraud, everyday consumers are now equipped to execute high-quality, hard-to-detect abuse at scale. The result is a new fraud landscape defined by speed, coordination, and near-perfect “legitimacy masks.” This session covered how merchants can gain the upper hand by dynamically connecting the dots across identities, devices, and merchants to better spot behavioral risk.

Who owns the risk when AI pays? Addressing agentic’s accountability void

Europe is a proving ground for agentic commerce and its risks across the buying journey. AI-driven shopping agents compress decision timelines, obscure intent, and degrade traditional fraud signals for merchants. And current channels don’t protect merchants from fraudulent orders.  Riskified found that 34% of the data used today by machine learning to make informed fraud decisions were missing from ChatGPT’s “Instant Checkout.” The agent also approved two separate Riskified Red Team tests of fraudulent orders. 

At the same time, AI is accelerating the development of more sophisticated fraud schemes. This session exposed dark web content showing fraudsters, step by step, how to exploit a new AI shopping platform, how AI tools help them scale and accelerate schemes, and more.

IXOPAY and Booking.com joined Riskified in this discussion on how agentic commerce is changing the risk, accountability, and conversion playbook.

Rue Gilt Groupe  —  Risk-aware customer experience (CX)

Returns costs are increasingly driven by fraud and serial abuse. And with the most harmful fraudsters hiding behind fake accounts, abuse is difficult to detect without a robust graph of orders, claims, and identity clustering.

By integrating real-time identity risk scores directly into customer service workflows, Rue Gilt Groupe is enabling agents to instantly distinguish between loyal members and professional abusers, delivering a better experience for trusted customers while mitigating losses from fraud and abuse.

Maria Vargas

SVP of Member Experiences, Rue Gilt Groupe

When you know who you’re dealing with, you don’t have to choose between protecting the business and delighting the customer. You can do both.”

This session explores how Rue Gilt Groupe leverages Riskified’s identity engine and cross-merchant network to move beyond traditional CX automation.

Read more about the partnership, and watch this full webinar for a deeper dive.

Tiqets  —  Defending the booking journey against bot and carding attacks

In this travel-focused session, Tiqets’ fraud manager laid out how modern travel platforms can leverage rate limits, pre-authorization logic, and proactive product disabling to structurally break bot profit models. She makes the case for transforming fraud management from a localized security burden into a continuous, automated trust function that spans the entire booking journey.

Anne Pauline Van Schagen

Fraud Manager, Tiqets

This partnership has been big win for us. Riskified blocks fraudsters effectively, our approval rates have improved, and the results speak for themselves — I’m very happy with what we’ve built together.”

Gymshark —  Celebrating Ash Cummings, Titan of Europe 

Presented annually at Ascend, Riskified’s Titans of Ecommerce Awards honor exceptional ecommerce leaders who are advancing fraud prevention while driving measurable business growth.

This year, Ash Cummings of Gymshark was named Titan of Europe and received his award in London.

Ash has transformed fraud and policy abuse management at Gymshark into a strategic, data-driven function. By implementing advanced policy controls, integrating fraud intelligence across operational systems, and leveraging tools such as Identity Explore to uncover abusive networks, he has significantly reduced promo abuse, loyalty abuse, and Item Not Received (INR) fraud. His work has strengthened both revenue protection and customer experience while improving operational efficiency, particularly during high-demand product launches.

More on the Titans of Ecommerce

Across our network: a vertical-by-vertical look at risk

From payments and remittances to crypto and gaming, the Riskified merchant network continues to expand into new sectors. Check out these roundtable discussions from London for industry-specific insights:

• Retail and fashion: Risk-aware identity intelligence that delivers loyalty 
• Travel and hospitality: Booking lifecycle risk mitigation in the airline and OTA industries 
• Cross-asset transfer: Assessing crypto and money movement risk in real time 
• Agentic commerce in practice: Managing risk when AI buys
• Retail and omnichannel: Balancing instant fulfillment with evolving fraud
• Ticketing and live experiences: Defeating bots and safeguarding the fan experience

About Ascend

For nearly a decade, Ascend has been the premier annual summit for ecommerce risk management, bringing together industry leaders and fraud experts to discuss the evolving challenges and opportunities in the world of online business. Five global events feature inspiring keynotes, panel discussions, and insights into tackling fraud while unlocking growth in ecommerce.