Ascend 2026 North America recap: Intelligence in motion

Ascend North America 2026 brought together the ecommerce community at a pivotal moment for the industry. While online retail sales are projected to hit $8 trillion by 2027, AI-powered schemes will likely more than double payment fraud in the next five years. Criminals are using generative AI to scale their operations and exploit exploding volume and new payment vectors. 

Merchants have no choice but to adapt. Ascend 2026 unveiled innovations and insights to put that shift in motion, 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 from New York.

The highlights

Keynote 2026: Adaptive risk intelligence and AI that protects, predicts, and performs

In this year’s opening address, Riskified Co-founder and CEO Eido Gal set the stage for how merchants will need to adapt to a new high-stakes environment. He also unveiled groundbreaking innovations to support them — a powerful suite of tools within Riskified’s Control Center designed to give fraud teams greater visibility into risk patterns, conversational AI-driven insights, and the ability to tailor and automate more of their risk workflows. 

Among the tools introduced:

• Identity Explore 2.0, which delivers an unprecedented level of interactivity and insight into network-wide identities, providing a stronger ability to detect and block hidden clusters of bad actors. 
• Riskified’s AI Risk Analyst (Riskified ARIA), a new AI assistant that enables fraud specialists to use simple conversational language to instantly assess transaction-level explainability, visualize specific performance trends, and isolate specific risk indicators.
• Decision Studio enhancements that allow teams to turn what they learn from Riskified ARIA, decision explainability, and Identity Explore into deployable business rules.

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

Beyond the transaction: The shift to network intelligence

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 The traditional “snapshot” approach — evaluating transactions in isolation — is not only outdated, but also actively risky in today’s environment.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 covers how merchants can gain the upper hand by dynamically connecting the dots across identities, devices, and merchants to better spot behavioral risk.

Before the buy button: Taking risk intelligence upstream

Fraud is shifting upstream, targeting account creation, login, and customer interactions that occur long before checkout. Attackers exploit gaps across the full account lifecycle — opening sleeper accounts, abusing promotions, and taking over legitimate users to extract value over time. 

Zahava Dalin-Kaptzan

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Riskified

“Fraudsters know that the earlier they get in, the easier everything becomes…they steal or build what looks like a trustworthy account so when they hit checkout, you’ll be less likely to friction what looks like a good account.”

This Ascend session explores how merchants can apply dynamic defenses at every stage of the user journey to incorporate identity, behavior, and intent. Full-journey intelligence can help them better distinguish between legitimate and malicious activity, reducing fraud exposure while avoiding unnecessary friction for trusted customers.

Who owns the risk when AI pays? Addressing the accountability void in agentic commerce

Agentic commerce is reshaping transactions and exposing a growing “accountability gap” in the process. AI-driven shopping agents compress decision timelines, obscure intent, and degrade traditional fraud signals for merchants. At the same time, AI is accelerating the development of more sophisticated fraud schemes.

As AI agents evolve into autonomous buyers, merchants must rethink risk ownership and infrastructure. Static, transaction-level controls are no longer sufficient, and success depends on network-level identity intelligence, real-time behavioral analysis, and orchestration across fragmented protocols to maintain visibility and control.

In this two-part session, hear both expert discussion and early adopter insight from the CTO of IXOPAY and the SVP of Digital at JD Finish Line.

Risk-aware customer experience (CX)

NRF research shows that 9% of total returns costs in 2025 were driven by fraud or 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 Riskified’s real-time identity risk scores directly into customer service workflows, Rue Gilt Group 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 Group leverages Riskified’s identity engine and cross-merchant network to move beyond traditional CX automation.

You can also read more about the partnership or watch this full webinar for a deeper dive.

Innovation in action: Merchant stories

Pangea Money Transfer — Identity-driven intelligence for approvals and abuse prevention

Learn what happened when this Chicago-based fintech implemented a holistic optimization strategy that manages fraud across the entire user journey.

Jorge Sanhueza

Director AML Operations, Pangea

“Suddenly, what looked like random, ‘one-off’ transactions revealed themselves as part of a coordinated web. We stopped chasing individuals and started dismantling ecosystems.”

Podium — Scaling smarter: Turning fraud decisions into revenue growth

Podium’s Senior Payments Manager, Tyler Roberts, unpacks the journey to real-time, automated decisioning that removes human bottlenecks from the payment flow.

Michael Kors —  Celebrating Joseph Chin, Titan of Americas

Announced annually at Ascend, Riskified’s Titans of Ecommerce Awards recognize outstanding ecommerce leaders who are redefining fraud prevention while driving business growth. Joseph Chin, Senior Director of Revenue Assurance, Michael Kors, was named Titan of Americas and received his award at Ascend North America.

Joseph Chin has evolved revenue assurance into a strategic lever for growth at Michael Kors. Deeply knowledgeable in fraud and payments, he maintains a hands-on approach, continually collaborating with Riskified to identify innovative opportunities, optimize performance, and pilot new initiatives. He is highly effective at building internal alignment and securing stakeholder buy-in for new strategies. His leadership shone during Cyber Five, where his close collaboration with Riskified and real-time insights delivered one of Michael Kors’ strongest performance periods.

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.