Liminal Names Unit21 a Leader in Friendly ACH Fraud Prevention

We’re excited to share that Unit21 has been recognized as a Leader in the Liminal analyst report on friendly ACH and first-party fraud prevention, which evaluated vendors' ability to detect complex first-party abuse. This is strong validation of our mission to equip risk and compliance teams with the most advanced tools to stop fraud before it impacts customers or the bottom line. 

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The recognition highlights what we’ve always believed: that effective fraud prevention requires systems designed for how first-party fraud actually happens, through real-time, explainable, and intelligence-driven decisioning. Liminal recognized Unit21 for moving beyond point-in-time transaction scoring to understand relationships, behavior, and sequential patterns.

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What Analysts Called Out as Differentiators

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According to the Liminal evaluation, Unit21 stands out for capabilities that directly address how first-party fraud actually behaves in the real world:

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Real-Time Decisions Without Engineering Bottlenecks

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Unit21 supports batch processing, near-real-time APIs, and sub-second real-time decisions (≈250ms), enabling live transaction screening without requiring risk teams to rely on engineering resources. This dramatically increases operational agility as fraud patterns evolve.

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Graph-Based Intelligence That Surfaces Hidden Risk

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First-party abuse often hides across relationships—shared devices, accounts, IPs, and entry-level behavior sequences. Unit21’s graph analytics and directional monitoring of senders and receivers expose these coordinated patterns, enabling teams to intervene earlier and with greater confidence. 

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Another thing is that it includes capturing sequential fraud patterns, such as the “A-then-B-then-C” activity, which are common in coordinated friendly ACH abuse but are missed by static rules.

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Explainable, Operationally Ready Workflows

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Liminal highlighted Unit21’s focus on empowering fraud and compliance teams with self-service rule configuration, validation, and testing tools, along with continuous performance tracking, all while maintaining the auditability and explainability required for real-world compliance operations.

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Strengthened by Broader Fraud Intelligence

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Unit21’s Fraud Consortium spans over 80 banks, credit unions, and fintechs, representing approximately 34% of the U.S. adult population, allowing customers to benefit from shared, peer-reported fraud insights while preserving privacy.

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Why This Matters for Friendly ACH and First-Party Fraud Prevention

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Friendly ACH and first-party fraud are among the most complex and operationally challenging types of payment abuse. Traditional rules-only systems and static compliance tools simply can’t keep up.

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Unit21’s platform was built to meet the moment, with technology that doesn’t just flag risk, but understands it in real time, empowers fraud teams to act decisively, and evolves alongside emerging first-party fraud patterns. 

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Fintechs operating in real time and banks using batch or standard APIs will benefit from this, as they require fraud controls that work across modern and legacy environments.

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Thank You to Our Community

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We’re grateful to our customers and partners whose feedback, use cases, and relentless pursuit of better fraud outcomes helped shape this recognition. We’ll keep building toward a future where fraud is not just detected, but also prevented.

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Read the full Liminal analyst report to learn why Unit21 was named a Leader in friendly ACH and first-party fraud prevention.