Fraud doesn’t just show up as a stolen card anymore—it arrives as coordinated global operations and as “friendly” misuse from customers who otherwise look perfect on paper. We sit down with Armen Najarian, CMO at Sift, to unpack how merchants can block the bad without breaking the checkout flow for everyone else. From account takeovers and identity theft to policy abuse and return gaming, Armin explains why risk isn’t a back‑office metric but a core part of customer experience, where a single false positive can cost a loyal buyer and a long relationship.
We dig into how Sift evaluates identity in real time, returning a risk score in about 200 ms, and why context across a network of merchants beats one‑off signals. It takes a network to fight a network, and that shared view turns fragmented behavior into reliable trust decisions. The conversation moves to agentic commerce—AI agents that can discover, sign up, and transact on our behalf. Convenience is huge, but so are questions: how do we authenticate agents, delegate consent, assign liability, and keep fraudsters from hiding behind machine identities? With card networks, banks, processors, and solution providers racing toward standards, the stakes rise as forecasts point to a leap from billions today to over a trillion dollars in agent‑driven transactions by 2030.
We also explore why Gen Z gets phished more despite digital fluency, the practical limits of self‑sovereign identity in the private sector, and the growing dual threat: organized crime scaling up and first‑party misuse spreading inside customer bases. If you care about conversion, approval rates, and loyalty as much as chargebacks, this is a roadmap for making trust invisible when it should be, and unmistakable when it must be. If this conversation helped you see risk differently, follow, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.