Payments Giants Threaten Forter Leadership

The real threat to Forter is not another fraud startup, it is a payments giant turning fraud into a bundled feature. Forter wins today because it is processor agnostic and built for large merchants that use multiple payment providers, but Stripe and Adyen sit closer to the payment itself. They see more raw transaction data, control checkout and authorization flows, and can fold fraud, routing, and conversion into one system, which is hard for a third party to match.

• Forter has real scale of its own. It processed $250B of GMV in 2021, more than $2T to date, and built a network spanning 500,000 plus businesses and 2B plus digital identities. That is why it sits at the top tier with Riskified and Signifyd rather than as a niche point tool.
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• The advantage of Stripe Radar and Adyen risk tools is structural, not just model quality. Stripe says Radar learns from more than $1.4T of annual payment volume and uses hundreds of signals from across its network. Adyen says its fraud and conversion products improve as processed volume scales, with 2024 volume at about €1.29T.
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• Large merchants often keep Forter because they want a fraud layer that works across processors. That same enterprise preference shows up in checkout, where bundled vendors appeal more to SMBs, while bigger merchants usually keep separate payments and fraud contracts so they can mix providers and avoid getting locked into one stack.
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The next phase of competition is likely to center on who controls the full decision at checkout, not just who flags fraud best. Forter is moving wider into identity, policy abuse, payment routing, and agentic commerce so it stays valuable even when payments companies improve their native tools. That makes its future less about pure fraud scoring and more about being the neutral trust layer across fragmented commerce stacks.