Opeyemi Lagunju’s Anti-Fraud Roadmap for Banking and Technology
In the convergence of banking and technology, velocity is both the value proposition and the vulnerability. Instant payments, embedded finance, and API-first architectures have erased friction, and with it, many of the natural checkpoints that once slowed fraud. Financial institutions and fintechs now operate in milliseconds, where criminals pivot as fast as code is deployed. […]
In the convergence of banking and technology, velocity is both the value proposition and the vulnerability. Instant payments, embedded finance, and API-first architectures have erased friction, and with it, many of the natural checkpoints that once slowed fraud. Financial institutions and fintechs now operate in milliseconds, where criminals pivot as fast as code is deployed. The battlefield is layered with device spoofing, synthetic identities, merchant abuse, insider access, and model manipulation. To compete, fraud prevention must be as nimble as product innovation, governed like a mission-critical system and measured like a P&L.
Opeyemi Lagunju, is a risk and accounting professional whose career spans financial analysis, assurance, and large-scale systems work, provides practical anti-fraud strategies in banking and technology. She has led international engagements across regulated environments, guiding fortune 500 companies to align controls with how their systems actually function in real time. She offers exclusive anti-fraud strategies in banking and technology.
Immediate Response Vs Delayed Action
According to Lagunju, banking and technology sectors are “two industries that process high‑value transactions and large sensitive data through complex digital ecosystems. They present large attack surfaces and fast‑evolving threats, making them prime targets where strong anti‑fraud strategies have the highest impact.” For her, the first fraud-prevention principle in banking and tech is immediacy. She cautions that “relying solely on batch processing equates to underwriting losses.” Lagunju advocates for the use of streaming analytics, which assess transactions, device signals, and user behaviors in real time. She explains, “Consider risk scoring as a dynamic perimeter, each event incrementally adjusts your assessment of users, devices, and merchants.”
That urgency is non-negotiable when dollars and identities move at the speed of light. Lagunju puts it plainly “Fraud is like an adversary testing your defenses every minute and you can’t afford to lower your guard. If you wait, you’ve already paid the invoice for losses and trust. For example, a suspicious device fingerprint from a new location while spend surges across linked merchants would be a stop sign.” As Lagunju emphasizes, “Real time monitoring is an ideal operating posture. You need systems that spontaneously decide in the flow, challenge, step-up, or block, before money moves.”
Far gone are the days when identity verification was a one-time hurdle. In today’s digital finance, it is a continuous process. Lagunju recommends binding identities to multiple anchors such as behavioral biometrics, and geospatial coherence. “Treat identity as a state that strengthens with every legitimate interaction,” she says. “An unexpected shift in state should make you pause and verify.”
This means replacing rigid checkpoints signals like device hygiene, behavioral cadence and session continuity into a rolling confidence score. “This is like a graph that enriches itself with every low-risk confirmation and every high-signal behavior,” Lagunju says. “The goal is to continually raise its confidence while minimizing customer drag.”
Segregation of Duties in Microservices
Traditional segregation-of-duties (SoD) thinking often breaks in distributed architectures. Lagunju’s approach is to match business capabilities with service permissions, and control toxic combinations across APIs and queues. “Approval processes need to be stringent, and the right questions need to be asked: the process for limit increase, change in merchant’s settlement bank, and trigger a payout trigger,” she explains. “If one identity can do all three, you’ve built a fraud pipeline.”
She encourages engineering, risk and finance teams to co-design privilege tiers and rotate secrets aggressively. “Assume credentials leak. Make them expire before attackers can exploit them.”
This collaborative mindset extends beyond technical controls to organizational culture. Lagunju emphasizes the importance of regular cross-team reviews and scenario-based testing to uncover hidden privilege escalations. “It’s not enough to set policies and walk away. Teams should simulate real-world attack paths and audit for privilege creep,” she advises. Organizations can adapt their controls as systems evolve, ensuring that security measures remain robust even as business needs and architectures change, through open communication between engineering, risk, and compliance,
Insider Risk: The Uncomfortable Frontier
Insiders, especially those with elevated access, remain a critical concern. “The riskiest fraud doesn’t always look like theft,” Lagunju says. “It can be quiet manipulation such as whitelisting a device, adjusting a velocity limit, or suppressing alerts on a trusted merchant.” Her prescription is immutable logging, periodic access recertification, and red teaming of control bypass paths. “Put your best engineers on adversarial reviews of finance-critical code paths. If they can cheat your system, someone else will.”
Lagunju also highlights the psychological and operational dimensions of insider risk. “People rarely start out intending to abuse their access—pressure, opportunity, and rationalization build over time,” she notes. To counter this, she recommends building a culture of transparency, where unusual actions are not just logged but actively surfaced for peer review. “Automated anomaly detection is powerful but pairing it with human investigations catches subtle patterns that algorithms might miss.”
Executives, she argues, must normalize the idea that fraud defense is a product feature. “Ship controls with the same pride as you ship user experiences,” Lagunju says. “Teams can innovate responsibly when incentives are aligned with bonuses that recognize both growth and net fraud outcomes.