Every marketer knows launch day. You hit publish, the internal email and press release goes out, and the dashboard starts to glow. What the dashboard doesn’t show you is everything that came before it: months of planning, late-night Slack threads, and a surprising number of debates about a single chart title. 

We just launched our second annual Fraud & Authentication Report. But instead of simply handing you the data, I want to show you how we built it, and why we built it so differently from most reports in our space. 

Start with the question nobody else is asking 

Most fraud reports in identity verification are built on platform data. They count the attacks blocked, the documents forged, the deepfakes caught. That data matters. It tells you a lot about what fraudsters are doing. 

It tells you very little about how the people on the other side of the screen feel. 

Our customers range from neobrokers and neobanks to fast-scaling fintechs and some of Europe’s largest financial institutions. Every one of them makes decisions about onboarding, and every one of those decisions lands on a real person. So, we asked those people directly. Together with our research partner Opinium and our PR agency Cognito, we surveyed 6,000 adults across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. 

The answers challenge one of our industry’s favourite assumptions. For a decade, banking and payments have chased frictionless. Yet 78% of respondents told us they’d accept a slower, more thorough verification process if it meant significantly less fraud risk. Just 12% said no. 

78% of Europeans would accept a slower, more thorough verification process if it meant significantly less fraud risk. 

Forty-five percent reported no frustration with authentication at all, and only 7% named the time it takes as their biggest gripe. What frustrates people is things not working: forgotten PINs, biometrics that fail, codes that never arrive. 

That doesn’t mean people love waiting. When nothing is at stake, speed still wins. But people will happily take a slower process when it buys them something. What they won’t accept is a slow process nobody explains: 62% want their bank to tell them why extra security steps are needed, rising to 71% in Germany.  That’s an education piece that’s really easy to implement. 

For our customers, that’s the whole point. If you optimise purely for conversion, you’re making decisions with half the picture. Understanding the person behind the application helps you build journeys that are safe and welcoming, and that’s a far stronger foundation for growth. 

It starts with a brief that says no 

So how does something like this come together? Long before a single question goes live, it starts with the brief. 

Writing a tight brief is genuinely hard. A project like this attracts ideas from every direction, and every one of them sounds reasonable. But a brief that tries to cover everything ends up saying nothing. Being single-minded about what we wanted to learn, and who it was for, is what keeps the content clear and consistent months down the line. 

We also looked back at our first edition with honest eyes. What landed? What didn’t? What did we wish we’d done differently? Learning from last year is how we make every year better. 

Consistency you can measure 

Because this is our second report, we could do something the first couldn’t: compare. We worked closely with Opinium and Cognito to align this year’s questions with last year’s, so we can track how attitudes shift over time. 

And they do shift. Worry about AI fraud and deepfakes eased from 49% to 43%. Trust in banks to handle money securely moved from 82% to 73%. Willingness to adopt new security measures dropped from 55% to 42%. One snapshot is interesting. A trend is something you can plan around. 

From data to stories 

When the data lands, the real work begins. Our PR and Comms Lead, Sara, led the analysis, working through the data market by market to find the stories that actually matter. Which findings hold across all six countries? Which are uniquely Dutch, German or Spanish? What’s surprising, and what’s simply true? 

A few of my favourites: France has the highest fraud incidence in the survey at 26%, yet the French are among the most reassured by repeat identity checks. The Dutch are the most sceptical about AI verification, and also the most willing to accept a slower process if it reduces fraud, at 80%. There’s no single European customer, which is exactly why a pan-European report needs local stories. 

One report, hundreds of assets

Next, the creative brief comes to life. How do we tell these stories across PR, social and web? How do we structure them for search, and increasingly for the AI tools people now use to find answers? How do we launch internally, working with our PMM Shauna to align with internal teams so our sales and product teams can use the insights in conversations and to shape what we build? How do we equip our leadership team to lead the conversation? 

And we never assume one launch day means everyone has seen it. We look at which formats genuinely work on each channel, from single images and motion to carousels and long-form articles. Our in-house designer, Ria, brings it all to life across hundreds of assets, mapped into a publishing calendar that runs to the end of the year. 

Then we keep listening. Every month we review what’s performing where, rebrief based on what we learn, and create new content that actually delivers for our audience. Launch day is the starting line, not the finish. 

The part nobody sees 

A project like this takes months to get off the ground. It’s never the only thing on the team’s plate, so it takes real collaboration, tenacity and grit from everyone involved. I’m incredibly proud of this team! 

It's also why I love what I do. Bringing clarity to chaos and making complexity simple is the job. As a judge at Cannes Lions and Eurobest, I've seen it again and again: the work that wins, B2C or B2B, is always built on a real human truth. And it never tries to do everything. Great work does one job, and lands one message with its audience. That's exactly why we fight so hard for a single-minded brief. 

Human-centric, AI-powered 

Marketing changes every day, and AI is speeding that up. For us, it’s a genuine superpower. It helps us plan faster, analyse more and make our slides a lot more beautiful in record time. 

But it can’t replace the thing that matters most. In B2B, a business doesn’t buy anything. A person does, on behalf of a business. Understanding those people, and putting their needs at the centre of everything we do, is our human superpower. It’s also exactly what this report is about. 

Explore the 2026 Fraud & Authentication Report.

Kelly McConville is VP of Marketing at Fourthline. She has more than 25 years of experience leading brand and growth at Philips, TomTom, Uber and N26, and has been a judge at Cannes Lions and Eurobest.