TransUnion enables real-time fraud decisions for global banks while cutting latency by 80%

TransUnion is one of the three largest global credit reporting agencies. For more than 50 years, it has helped organizations and consumers establish trust through identity intelligence and data insights. Headquartered in Chicago, TransUnion operates in more than 30 countries and provides services including credit reporting, identity verification, fraud prevention, and marketing analytics.

Through its acquisition of Neustar, TransUnion expanded its capabilities in digital identity and fraud detection. The TruValidate platform provides real-time identity verification and fraud decisioning to organizations across financial services, telecommunications, and e-commerce.

Real-time fraud protection without slowing onboarding

As banking moved rapidly toward digital onboarding, financial institutions faced a difficult tradeoff. They needed to detect fraud in real time while keeping account creation fast and frictionless for legitimate customers.

Banks rely on external identity providers such as TransUnion to enrich their internal data with additional identity intelligence and risk signals. Each onboarding request can trigger multiple identity and device lookups, meaning latency spikes in any single query can slow the entire transaction.

However, querying external systems introduced network latency that slowed the onboarding experience.

Network latency slowed fraud checks

When banks queried external identity systems across the internet, responses could take 150 to 200 milliseconds. These delays accumulated across multiple checks during onboarding.

Customer abandonment increased

If account creation took more than a few minutes, many legitimate customers abandoned the process. Fraud controls designed to protect the bank risked damaging the user experience.

Sensitive data required strict controls

Financial institutions were reluctant to move sensitive customer data outside their environments. At the same time, TransUnion needed to protect and control access to its proprietary identity datasets.

Rapid data growth strained legacy systems

As fraud detection models incorporated more attributes and historical signals, data volumes expanded rapidly. Legacy database systems struggled to scale while maintaining consistent low latency.

TransUnion needed a way to deliver identity intelligence to banks without forcing every fraud check to cross the network.

Real-time fraud decisioning inside the bank environment

To reduce latency and maintain strict data controls, TransUnion redesigned its architecture to move fraud decisioning closer to where transactions occur.

Instead of requiring banks to query TransUnion systems remotely, the company deployed its TruValidate platform directly inside customer environments using Aerospike Managed Services. This allowed fraud checks to run locally while keeping data synchronized with TransUnion’s central systems.

Local deployments inside bank environments

TruValidate instances run inside each bank’s infrastructure, enabling fraud checks to occur close to the application processing the onboarding transaction.

Real-time performance with Aerospike

Aerospike provides consistently low latency for identity lookups and risk scoring, ensuring predictable performance even as request volumes and data volumes grow.

Data synchronization with XDR

Aerospike Cross-Datacenter Replication (XDR) synchronizes data between TransUnion’s central systems and deployments running inside bank environments. This allows TransUnion to continuously update identity intelligence while maintaining a unified platform.

Secure and auditable data access

Fine-grained security controls, per-record encryption, and detailed auditing help ensure sensitive identity data remains protected even when deployed within customer infrastructure.

Operational simplicity with managed infrastructure

Aerospike’s Managed Services provides monitoring, scaling, and operational management, allowing TransUnion teams to focus on delivering fraud intelligence rather than managing database infrastructure.

This architecture allows TransUnion to extend its identity platform directly into bank environments while maintaining centralized control and data synchronization.

"Some of the biggest banks use our technology and they continue to be pretty blown away with our technology and the speed at which we do it. They say “you guys are fast, like really fast!" "

Gaurav Bairaria

TransUnionSr. Director - Product Engineering

Faster onboarding and stronger fraud prevention

By deploying TruValidate directly inside bank environments with Aerospike, TransUnion dramatically improved fraud decisioning performance while maintaining security and operational scale.

Fraud latency reduced by more than 80 percent

Response times dropped from 150–200 milliseconds to 25–30 milliseconds, enabling near real-time fraud decisions during onboarding.

Faster customer onboarding

Banks using the platform reported 20 to 25 percent faster account origination, helping reduce abandonment during signup flows.

Massive growth without rearchitecture

The platform scaled from roughly 6 TB of data to nearly 1 PB while maintaining service-level agreements.

Cost-efficient performance at scale

Aerospike Hybrid Memory Architecture enables high-performance access to large datasets using SSD-backed storage, reducing infrastructure costs compared with traditional in-memory systems.