Suncoast Credit Union

Suncoast Credit Union targets 2x growth, reduces fraud losses by 35% with Alloy

7th largest credit union in the U.S. drives growth while keeping members safe

01. At a glance 02. Accelerating member experience 03. Offering more products to members 04. Omnichannel fraud prevention 05. Putting member experience first 06. Results

At a glance

Industry
Credit Union
Established
1934
Headquartered
Tampa, FL
Assets Under Management
$20.7B

Suncoast Credit Union is the 7th-largest credit union in the United States based on membership, with nearly 1.4 million members across Florida and more than $20.7 billion in financial assets. 

The credit union has grown significantly over the years and has plans to increase in size to 2.5 million members by 2030, while remaining committed to a member-first, community-driven mission. Already, Suncoast is seeing strong momentum, with 8.25% year-over-year membership growth and a 17% increase in digital membership completion rates from 2024 to 2025. 

To meet this ambitious goal, the team needed a partner to help them enable a seamless member experience, onboard more legitimate members, and provide access to a wider range of financial products, while mitigating risks. In 2022, Suncoast chose Alloy as its strategic platform to power identity, fraud controls, and data orchestration across onboarding and post-onboarding member account activity.

35%
decrease in fraud losses
269M
digital logins executed in 2024
98%
auto-decisioning on logins
103K
digital products opened
91%
increase in new member digital logins within one day of account opening
17%
increase in new digital membership completion rates

Accelerating the member experience

Since the beginning, Suncoast has viewed Alloy as an integral part of its strategy to grow the credit union while providing seamless digital experiences for its members and expanding its features and products.

As a result, Suncoast has been able to significantly scale digital engagement, supporting 22 million logins per month while maintaining a seamless member experience.

Alloy’s AI-powered identity and fraud prevention platform enables Suncoast to bring together multiple sources of risk intelligence through pre-built integrations with leading solutions for identity and fraud risk. With Alloy, the Suncoast team can quickly determine the risk level of each customer at onboarding and continue to evaluate members’ evolving risk profiles by monitoring their account activity, getting alerted to risky behavior, and automatically taking action to mitigate it.

“Alloy plays a big role in helping us say ‘yes’ to growth, without compromising our member-first culture. A great member experience today is fast, intuitive, and largely invisible for members. From a risk perspective, members can open accounts digitally with minimal friction while behind the scenes, Alloy is orchestrating all of the identity, device, and fraud signals in real time, which allows us to approve more good members automatically and intervene only when there is real risk.”

Eva Coffee, Manager of Digital Strategy, Suncoast Credit Union

Unlocking the ability to offer more financial products, like real-time payments (RTP)

Like many financial institutions, fraud risks associated with real-time payments (RTP), peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, and other new financial products had historically made it difficult for Suncoast to offer those options to members. 

By implementing Alloy across the credit union to manage fraud at onboarding and throughout the member lifecycle, Suncoast can interdict risky activity that isn’t caught at onboarding. Those controls help enable the credit union to offer these new financial products safely and seamlessly to members.  Additionally, internal teams have access to the same data and decisions via Alloy, streamlining vendor management across the organization and unlocking operational insights for the Suncoast team.

Because the partnership helps keep Suncoast future-proofed against risks, Suncoast can continuously offer its members the financial products they are looking for.

“We found ourselves held back from offering critical capabilities like real-time payments. It seemed to always come down to fraud; once a real-time payment goes out, it's very hard to pull it back. If an account gets taken over or a member gets tricked into sending money, we may not have time to catch it before the funds are gone. We wanted stronger checks and clearer playbooks in place before we offered something that moves that fast. Alloy helps us feel more confident about who's making the request, so we can move ahead on higher-risk features without inviting more fraud.”

Diana Nixon, Vice President of Digital Strategy, Suncoast Credit Union

This foundation has enabled Suncoast to expand access to new offerings, resulting in over 103,000 digital products opened through the platform.

Omnichannel fraud prevention that starts at onboarding and continues throughout the member’s lifecycle 

Suncoast went on to expand its use of Alloy to prevent fraud on mobile and in-branch channels in addition to digital channels. Alloy enabled them to easily extend the same fraud controls across channels, allowing them to more effectively manage fraud risks without hampering the member experience. 

Suncoast also began to implement Alloy’s insights into their historical performance to help optimize policies going forward: when Suncoast identified a lack of being able to match KYC elements (Name/DOB/SSN/Address) as driving a high percentage of manual reviews within the organization, they used Alloy’s comprehensive Testing Suite to make data-driven decisions by testing different data sources. 

Suncoast ultimately implemented a policy change that increased auto-approved applications by 6.47% in their digital channel and by 7.09% in their in-branch channel. These improvements contributed to broader efficiency gains, including a measurable reduction in manual reviews across channels. Suncoast also saw corresponding reductions in both auto-denials and manual reviews as a result of this change. 

“Alloy gives us visibility and control we simply didn't have before. Instead of fragmented signals and siloed decisions, we get a unified view of an entity's risk profile that unlocks faster decision-making, better collaboration across teams, and the ability to test and optimize without disrupting the member's experience.”

Eva Coffee, Manager of Digital Strategy, Suncoast Credit Union

Throughout the project, Alloy and Suncoast worked together to strike the right balance between security and friction for genuine members using Suncoast’s financial products.  By connecting ongoing login events to onboarding identity data, they were able to evaluate every sign-in in the context of the full member profile. Using adaptive risk-based authentication, potentially risky users were subjected to additional layers of step-up verification, keeping bad actors out of the platform while still preserving a seamless experience for genuine members, including “snowbirds” whose locations change seasonally.

At scale, this approach has allowed Suncoast to automatically decision on 98% of login events, ensuring both speed and accuracy.

"Alloy gave us stronger authentication and the ability to make decisions in real-time, which helps reduce fraud loss. We saw a significant decrease in fraud loss per member. Enriching member logins with device intelligence helped us identify suspicious actors earlier and reduce account takeover activity before it progressed.”

Nicole Allen, Vice President of Fraud Management, Suncoast Credit Union

Putting member experience at the forefront

Alloy and Suncoast’s partnership had an immediate and far-reaching impact on the business and its ability to support its members. 

Fraud rings tend to target financial institutions on weekends, holidays, and during natural disasters. As an example, in October 2024, when Hurricane Milton significantly impacted Suncoast’s service area, the credit union experienced several account takeover fraud attempts as bad actors sought to exploit the chaotic atmosphere in the region. Suncoast saw the attack in Alloy immediately and automatically countered it. By doing this, the credit union was able to prevent financial losses and, more importantly, was able to keep channels open so that they could support the genuine members who were urgently in need.

“In October 2024, during Hurricane Milton, we saw a spike in account takeover attempts while our members were dealing with the disruption. Alloy helped us spot the pattern quickly, and we tightened our checks right away. We prevented losses and kept our digital channels available so that members could focus on taking care of their personal needs from the storm."

Diana Nixon, Vice President of Digital Strategy, Suncoast Credit Union

This real-time response capability is part of a broader impact: Suncoast achieved a 35% reduction in annual fraud losses while maintaining uninterrupted access for members.

Results

Suncoast Credit Union implemented Alloy's AI-powered identity and fraud prevention platform to address the following needs and objectives across the customer lifecycle:

  • Real-time fraud monitoring: Alloy's platform helps Suncoast risk-rate individual members and interdict both non-monetary events and monetary transactions in real-time so that the organization can maintain low fraud loss levels per member, decreasing fraud losses by 35%
  • Dynamic member experiences: Suncoast aims to create more dynamic experiences for members by tailoring individual experiences based on member risk levels. Using risk-based authentication, Alloy evaluates multiple identity signals in context, allowing genuine members to access Suncoast’s financial products with minimal friction while introducing additional step-up verification measures for potentially fraudulent applicants. 
  • Reduced fraud losses, growth, and scalability: Alloy's flexible, scalable solutions enable seamless integrations with best-in-class solution partners and support Suncoast's ambitious growth goals while minimizing fraud risk. With Alloy, Suncoast reduced fraud losses by 35% YoY while membership increased over 8% YoY. 
  • Operational efficiency: Alloy enables Suncoast to achieve higher auto-approval rates for smoother new member onboarding and increased operational efficiency by centralizing identity risk governance on one platform.
  • Holistic fraud prevention: Suncoast leverages Alloy’s AI-powered models — Fraud Attack Radar and Fraud Signal — to detect fraud across its portfolio, gaining actionable insights and quick responses to fraud incidents. This approach reduces the need for manual reviews and addresses weaknesses in traditional fraud systems. Additionally, Suncoast can track suspicious activity in online and mobile banking, connecting it to specific devices to support Fraud Risk Management investigations, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and capacity.

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