Case Study: Uphold cuts return losses 80% and speeds fund access with Plaid

With Plaid, Uphold protects their customers from fraud while reducing their return rates and losses

Uphold, a global “anything-to-anything” trading platform serving customers in 184 countries, needed to stop fraud and reduce high return rates and losses without hurting the customer experience. Already using Plaid’s Auth and Identity to verify bank account ownership, Uphold partnered with Plaid to expand into a comprehensive payments risk solution.

Plaid implemented end-to-end payments risk — account linking and identity matching, two rapid risk scores derived from 1,000+ signals, and real-time balance checks — so low-risk transactions are released immediately while higher-risk activity is reviewed or declined. With Plaid, Uphold cut transactions subject to a 65-day withdrawal hold by 83% (many now released after four days), reduced return losses by 80%, lowered customer complaints by 77%, and trimmed the fraud team’s workload by about 42%, improving onboarding speed and driving net customer inflows.

Uphold

Chris Adjei-Ampofo

Chief Information Officer