Your loyalty payment fraud control looked for the wrong file. Now what?

Test loyalty payment fraud controls at the customer profile first. Checkout and refund controls remain necessary, but they are downstream once loyalty, tender, and identity ride in the same payment flow. The fraud test is whether finance can prove who changed the account state before a credit, reward, return, or stored value release became payable.

The profile edit is where the money starts moving

The control event is the change that makes the later transaction look ordinary. Authorization may only confirm that the system accepted the new account state.

PYMNTS reported that Adyen processed €803.8 billion, with processed volume up 24% year over year. In-person volume rose 28% to €175.7 billion, and Unified Commerce volume rose 27% to €240.9 billion.

Those numbers are not only volume figures. They show more merchant activity moving through systems that connect online commerce, physical checkout, and customer recognition. The merchant account is no longer only a CRM record. In some flows, it becomes part of the payment evidence.

Adyen also acquired Talon.One, whose technology runs promotions and loyalty programs for more than 300 global brands. On the earnings call, Adyen Co-Founder and Co-CEO Pieter van der Does tied merchant loyalty concerns to the risk that AI initiated shopping could put more distance between retailers and their customers. Adyen said it intends to stay on the merchant side rather than build a branded consumer wallet.

That matters for finance. If the shopper remains the merchant’s domain, then the proof of authorship sits with the merchant’s systems. A processor report can say the credit settled. It may not say who changed the phone number, bound the device, merged the profile, raised the reward balance, or changed the preferred refund route before the credit was created.

Where loyalty payment fraud controls should sit

They should sit before the credit is generated. Finance needs evidence that the account state was legitimate before money, points, credit, or stored value left the company.

Start with credits that look clean. Pull the account changes that occurred before a material refund, return, goodwill credit, reward issue, or wallet load. Then test who owned each change.

Customer profile edits, owned by CRM or commerce operations. Capture actor, role, time, channel, old value, new value, approval path, and whether the edit changed refund eligibility.

Device binding and recovery changes, owned by identity or fraud operations. Match device enrollment, device removal, password reset, and account recovery to the later credit event.

Reward issuance rules, owned by marketing with finance review. Test manual awards, campaign overrides, tier changes, expiration reversals, and point transfers before redemption or refund.

Tender switching at return, owned by payments operations. Flag cases where the purchase tender and refund tender differ, especially when the customer profile changed in the same review window.

Refund routing exceptions, owned by treasury or controllership. Require evidence for credits sent to a different account, wallet, card, gift balance, or stored value instrument.

Reconciliation sampling, owned by controllership. Select credits by prior account change, not only by amount, processor exception, or chargeback outcome.

The gap is usually not that nobody reviewed refunds. The gap is that the review starts after the decisive event. By the time the credit appears in the refund report, the system may have already converted a profile edit into a valid looking entitlement.

Checkout providers are bundling more than tender

Installment platforms are now injecting credit terms directly into checkout without separate integrations. PYMNTS reported that Airwallex is adding Affirm installment payment options to its checkout platform, giving merchants in 35 countries a way to offer pay over time financing to eligible U.S. shoppers.

The report said qualifying U.S. shoppers can choose four interest free installments or monthly payments spread over as many as 24 months. It also said Airwallex supports more than 160 payment methods worldwide.

Those are product facts for the providers. For the controller, they are control facts. Checkout is becoming a place where identity, credit terms, payment choice, and merchant acceptance meet in one flow.

Activity boundaries are becoming a payments control issue in other rails as well. ABA Banking Journal reported that the American Bankers Association urged Treasury not to allow states to greatly expand the scope of services offered by payment stablecoin issuers beyond what is spelled out in the Genius Act.

The merchant lesson is narrower than stablecoin policy. When a payment function carries adjacent services, the control file has to name which system gave authority for the added feature and which team reviewed the exception. The file has to show more than successful payment processing. It has to show why the customer was entitled to that route, that credit, that reward, and that refund destination.

The owner may be split across teams. Marketing may own rewards logic. Commerce operations may own account data. Fraud may own device risk. Treasury may own cash release. Controllership may own the close and the evidence file. The fraud case will not respect that chart.

Refunds can pass settlement and fail authorship

Settlement proves the processor moved the entry. It does not prove the account change that justified the entry was made by the right person, on the right device, under the right approval.

Many finance tests still begin with settlement, chargebacks, processor fees, and exception reports. Those tests remain necessary. They are late for this exposure.

The first useful sample may be every refund preceded by a profile change, every reward redemption preceded by account recovery, or every stored value release preceded by a new device binding. This is not a larger audit. It is a different starting point.

A finance team can make the file stronger without waiting for a new platform. For a sample of credits, the reviewer should be able to reconstruct the chain: account state before the change, actor and device behind the change, approval or rule that allowed it, transaction that used it, and settlement that completed it.

If any link is missing, the refund may be economically correct and still unauditable. The next control change is small and uncomfortable. Stop selecting only the refunds that look odd at settlement. Select the refunds that looked ordinary after the customer profile changed.