Revenue recovery strategies: How fraud and risk teams can cut costs and recover lost margin
Guest: Gil Rosenthal
In this episode, I’m talking about something that matters even more when budgets get tighter and leadership starts looking harder at every team through a cost lens, revenue recovery strategies. Because when companies are dealing with economic pressure, supply chain strain, layoffs, and uncertainty, fraud, risk, and trust and safety teams usually feel that pressure too.
And this is where I think a lot of teams miss a real opportunity.
If I only talk about fraud in terms of losses prevented, I may still sound like a cost center to the rest of the business. But if I can identify ways to cut costs, improve efficiency, and recover revenue that is already leaking out of the system, the conversation changes. Now I am not just defending a budget. I am helping protect margin in a way leadership can actually feel.
That is exactly what Gil Rosenthal and I get into here. Gil shares his top strategies for fintechs and financial institutions to improve fintech fraud efficiency, reduce waste, and find more value inside existing operations. I share my own top strategies for ecommerce and marketplace teams to do the same. What I like about this conversation is that none of these ideas live in isolation. They support each other. And when teams put them together well, they can shift how the business sees fraud team business value entirely.
And that matters.
Because revenue recovery strategies are not just about squeezing more from the same team. They are about making fraud operations optimization visible, practical, and tied directly to business outcomes.
Here is what that revenue recovery approach means in practice:
- I need to look at fraud and risk work not just as loss prevention, but as revenue protection and recovery
- I create stronger fraud team ROI when I identify margin leaks, inefficiencies, and missed recovery opportunities
- I improve fraud department value when I connect operational decisions to measurable business impact
- I make cost reduction in fraud more credible when I focus on practical changes that improve efficiency without weakening protection
What you’ll hear in this episode:
- Which revenue recovery strategies Gil recommends for fintech and financial institution risk teams
- How I think about ecommerce revenue recovery and reducing fraud-related costs
- Why fraud operations optimization matters more during periods of economic pressure
- What fraud team ROI can look like when teams focus on efficiency as well as defense
- How revenue protection and recovery can change the way leadership sees fraud department value
You should listen to this episode if you:
- Lead fraud, risk, or trust and safety teams and need stronger revenue recovery strategies
- Want better cost reduction in fraud without weakening controls
- Are focused on ecommerce revenue recovery, fintech risk cost control, or financial recovery in risk teams
- Need ideas for increasing operational efficiency and improving fraud program profitability
- Want to show clearer fraud team business value during a tough budget cycle
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Episode notes & key takeaways
Why revenue recovery strategies matter more when budgets tighten
Let’s break this down.
When the economy gets shaky, leadership attention tends to shift quickly toward cost control, efficiency, and proving value. Fraud teams feel that almost immediately. And honestly, that can be frustrating when fraud itself is not slowing down. In a lot of cases, the risk is going up while the tolerance for spend is going down.
That creates a challenge, but it also creates an opening.
Because this is exactly when revenue recovery strategies become more important. If I can show that my team is not just preventing bad outcomes but also identifying ways to recover lost funds, reduce operational waste, and protect margin more effectively, then the conversation gets a lot more strategic. I am no longer asking the business to care about fraud in theory. I am showing how fraud and risk work can support the company’s goals in a way leadership already understands.
That is the part I think matters most.
Fraud team ROI gets much easier to explain when I connect it to recovered revenue, avoided inefficiency, and the practical cost of doing nothing.
- Revenue recovery strategies become more valuable when businesses are under economic pressure
- Fraud team ROI is easier to demonstrate when I show both prevented loss and recovered value
- Cost reduction in fraud matters most when it improves efficiency without increasing exposure
- Fraud department value becomes clearer when I connect risk work directly to margin protection
How fintech and financial institutions can find more value in risk operations
Here’s what’s actually happening.
A lot of risk teams in fintech and financial institutions are sitting closer to recoverable value than they sometimes realize. But that value is easy to miss when the team is focused only on case handling, escalations, and day-to-day pressure. That is why I liked Gil’s perspective here. He is looking at the risk function not just as a defensive layer, but as a place where operational efficiency and financial recovery in risk teams can actually create measurable upside.
That is a very useful shift.
Because fintech fraud efficiency is not only about catching more fraud. It is also about handling the work in smarter ways, reducing unnecessary cost, and identifying where losses, frictions, or manual effort are eating into the business more than they should. Sometimes the opportunity is in process. Sometimes it is in recovery. Sometimes it is in how decisions get routed or resolved. But it is there.
And that matters.
Because if I want stronger fintech risk cost control, I need to look beyond the fraud event itself and ask where the wider system is losing money through inefficiency, duplication, or slow response.
- Fintech fraud efficiency improves when I look at the full operational cost of risk handling
- Financial recovery in risk teams often starts by identifying where value is leaking out of existing workflows
- Fraud operations optimization matters because manual effort and preventable delay both carry real cost
- Fintech risk cost control gets stronger when risk teams are measured on efficiency as well as defense
Where ecommerce revenue recovery usually gets overlooked
This is where things get interesting.
In ecommerce and marketplaces, I see a lot of companies focus heavily on fraud loss but not enough on the adjacent places where money is quietly slipping away. That can include avoidable operational friction, missed recovery opportunities, weak post-loss processes, inefficient reviews, unnecessary false declines, or disconnected ownership across teams.
That is a problem.
Because ecommerce revenue recovery is often hiding in the spaces between fraud, operations, customer support, payments, and finance. If those teams are not looking at the same picture, then recoverable value stays fragmented. Everyone sees part of the issue. No one owns the whole opportunity.
This is exactly why reducing fraud-related costs needs a broader lens.
I need to ask where my team is spending time that could be streamlined. Where good customers are being lost unnecessarily. Where recoverable funds are being ignored because they do not sit neatly inside one function. And where decisions made for risk reasons are creating downstream costs the business is not measuring clearly enough.
- Ecommerce revenue recovery often depends on fixing gaps between teams, not just inside one queue
- Reducing fraud-related costs requires visibility into both losses and operational inefficiencies
- Ecommerce fraud savings are easier to find when I connect fraud outcomes to support, payments, and margin
- Increasing operational efficiency matters because hidden process costs can erode value as much as direct fraud loss
Why fraud teams need to be seen as revenue protection and recovery
One of the strongest themes in this episode is that teams have an opportunity to change how they are perceived. And I think that matters a lot right now.
Too many businesses still default to seeing fraud as a cost center unless something dramatic happens. But if I can show how my team contributes to fraud program profitability, trust and safety cost savings, ecommerce fraud savings, and broader revenue protection and recovery, that framing starts to shift.
Not overnight, of course. But it shifts.
And that change in perception is not just about optics. It affects budget conversations, headcount decisions, vendor discussions, and whether leadership sees the team as reactive overhead or as a strategic function protecting business health. That is a big difference.
I do not think fraud teams should have to oversell themselves to be valued. But I do think we need to get better at translating the work into terms the rest of the business can understand quickly.
- Revenue protection and recovery is often a more useful framing than pure fraud prevention alone
- Fraud team business value becomes easier to communicate when I connect the work to financial outcomes
- Trust and safety cost savings and fraud program profitability should be part of the broader business conversation
- Fraud department value increases when the team is seen as protecting margin, not just blocking bad activity
The big takeaway from this episode is pretty straightforward. Revenue recovery strategies give fraud, risk, and trust and safety teams a stronger way to show value when the business is under pressure. In my conversation with Gil, what stands out is that cost reduction in fraud, increasing operational efficiency, ecommerce revenue recovery, and fintech fraud efficiency are not separate goals. They reinforce each other. And when I start treating fraud work as revenue protection and recovery, not just loss prevention, I create a much stronger case for the real business value of the team.
