Suncoast CU Fast-tracks Growth and Control with Alloy’s AI Fraud Prevention Platform

By Roy Urrico

Tampa-based Suncoast Credit Union chose New York City-based Alloy’s AI-powered identity and fraud prevention platform to help enable a seamless member experience, onboard more legitimate members, and provide access to a wider range of financial products, while mitigating risks. Alloy helps accelerate the financial institution's growth by helping control fraud risks while maintaining a member-first, mission-driven focus.

Nicole Allen, Vice President, Fraud Management at Suncoast Credit Union.

“Alloy was directly tied to our growth strategy,” Nicole Allen, Vice President, Fraud Management at Suncoast Credit Union, told Finopotamus. She recalled, “Suncoast has set a goal of nearly doubling membership to 2.5 million by 2030, and a one-time identity check at account opening was never going to get us there. Three priorities drove the decision: Deliver a world-class member experience, expand our digital product set while keeping friction low for legitimate members, and close new fraud gaps as the program scaled.”

The $20.7 billion Suncoast, which serves more than 1.3 million members across Florida with 80 full-service branches and ranks as one of the Top 10 credit unions in the U.S. in assets and membership size, selected Alloy as its strategic partner in 2022. “Alloy is the AI-powered identity and fraud prevention platform that accelerates onboarding, stops fraud, and scales compliance across the entire customer lifecycle,” Alloy Chief Product and Operating Officer Parilee Wang said.

Parilee Wang, Chief Product and Operating Officer, Alloy.

 Founded in 2015, Alloy is trusted by more than 800 of the world's leading financial institutions and fintechs — including 7 seven of the top 10 credit unions in the U.S.” Wang said., according to Wang.

Anatomy of a Successful Partnership

The credit union started with digital account onboarding and, over the following three years, expanded Alloy's coverage into login monitoring, device binding (creating a trusted link between Suncoast’s mobile app and member smartphones or tablets), ongoing fraud checks, and cross-channel decisioning that spans digital, mobile, and in-branch, Allen noted.

“Before going broad with Alloy, we used the platform's testing suite to validate data sources against our own workflows in a sandbox environment — so we could measure approval-rate and fraud-detection impact before any changes hit production. That test-then-deploy approach is part of why the rollout has been low-risk,” Allen expressed.

“It moved us from periodic, point-in-time identity checks to a continuous, always-on picture of the member,” said Allen. “We now apply device, behavioral, and identity signals at every login — not just at account opening — and Alloy's agentic and predictive AI lets us step a member up, let them through, or block them outright based on real-time risk.”

The same decisioning engine runs across digital, mobile, and in-branch channels, so a fraud signal in one channel updates the picture everywhere, Allen explained to Finopotamus. “Operationally, that means our fraud team works from a single, unified view of an entity instead of stitching together signals from siloed vendors. And strategically, it has opened the door to faster-moving products like real-time and peer-to-peer payments, which we had previously held back because once funds move, they're effectively gone.”

Measuring Results

The Suncoast team pointed out that Alloy can use adaptive authentication to put potentially risky users through additional layers of step-up verification and automatically mitigate threats across digital, mobile, and in-branch channels. This helps defend against bad actors entering the platform while still preserving a seamless experience for real members, including seasonal "snowbirds."

Prior to connecting with Alloy, Suncoast experienced fraud losses increasing almost 30% year over year (YoY), according to the credit union. After deploying Alloy (onboarding and expanding into login monitoring and cross-channel fraud controls), the credit union reduced fraud losses by over 35% from 2023 to 2024.

Allen listed other measurable benefits since deploying Alloy:

• A 17% lift in digital membership completion rates from 2024 to 2025.

• An 8% year-over-year membership growth — “material progress toward our 2030 goal.”

• In 2024 alone, 269 million digital logins monitored through Alloy's platform, generating 11,990 investigations.

• More than 103,000 digital products opened through the platform.

• A 10% increase in auto-approvals across channels.

"Alloy has delivered exceptional member growth results for Suncoast while delivering material fraud reduction," said Wang. "By using Alloy to centralize identity management throughout the customer lifecycle, Suncoast has built a scalable foundation that allows it to adapt to emerging threats, expand product offerings, and deliver dynamic, low-friction member experiences."

Looking forward, Suncoast is scaling Alloy into additional payment use cases alongside an upcoming mobile app launch, with a particular focus on real-time and peer-to-peer payments. “Products we previously held back due to fraud risk and that we can now extend with confidence because risk decisioning lives inside the payment flow itself,” said Allen.

Helps Credit Unions ID Members

“A few years ago, most credit unions treated identity verification as a one-time check at account opening, often requiring an in-person visit from a member to a physical branch,” noted Wang. “The shift we're seeing now — and Suncoast is a leading example — is to continuous, AI-driven decisioning across the full member lifecycle: device, behavioral, and identity signals applied at every login, payment, and high-risk action. That's where our actionable AI lives — agentic automation via Alloy's AI Assistant, predictive ML (machine learning) through Fraud Signal for ongoing monitoring, and portfolio-level detection via Fraud Attack Radar at onboarding.”

As a cloud-based SaaS, Alloy is a fully hosted platform with production and sandbox environments. Customers integrate it into existing systems through APIs while managing workflows and decisioning through the Alloy dashboard. Alloy integrates with proprietary systems and third-party solutions through a flexible orchestration layer, and the Alloy SDK helps credit unions seamlessly connect to best-in-class identity and fraud vendors, explained Wang.

“That gives teams access to more than 250 pre-built identity, fraud, credit, and compliance solutions, so they can configure workflows, route members through the right verification steps, and test or activate new partners without rebuilding separate vendor integrations," said Allen. “We also offer pre-built partnerships with digital account opening providers credit unions already use, including MANTL, Narmi, and Clutch, so the lift to deploy is measured in weeks, not quarters.”

Critical identity and fraud events happen at every member interaction, and Alloy is there for every single one, noted Wang. “We combine the industry's broadest open data network, a sophisticated identity-centric orchestration engine, and context-rich agentic and predictive intelligence to give credit unions a clear, always-on picture of their members and the ability to act on it instantly. The outcome: approve every good member without letting fraud in, monitor risk continuously, and roll out modern products like real-time payments with confidence. All of these help Suncoast grow as a business long term.”

Credit unions are also using Alloy to consolidate fragmented vendor relationships into a single decisioning layer that operates the same way across digital, mobile, and in-branch channels. According to Wang, “that consolidation is what makes it safe to extend faster-moving products like real-time and peer-to-peer payments, because risk decisioning lives inside the payment flow itself rather than as a batch review after the fact.”

“Alloy has delivered exceptional member growth results for Suncoast while delivering material fraud reduction, said Wang. "By using Alloy to centralize identity management throughout the customer lifecycle, Suncoast has built a scalable foundation that allows it to adapt to emerging threats, expand product offerings, and deliver dynamic, low-friction member experiences."