Invictus Growth Partners acquired a controlling interest in Informed.IQ through a $63 million growth equity investment, a move that highlights growing lender concern about fraud in loan applications. Informed.IQ sells AI-driven verification and fraud prevention tools that it says are used by large lenders to identify fraudulent activity across loan workflows. Wall Street Journal →
According to the Wall Street Journal, Informed.IQ’s tools have flagged a larger share of reviewed loans over time as fraud tactics become more sophisticated. The report describes the company’s models as trained on large volumes of loan document data, aimed at detecting inconsistencies and suspicious patterns that are difficult for manual review teams to catch at scale.
The company said it plans to expand beyond auto lending into additional categories such as mortgages and consumer lending. That expansion matters for credit unions, where growth strategies frequently depend on efficient, low-friction lending, but where fraud and misrepresentation can create outsized losses when controls lag volume.
For credit unions, the most relevant takeaways are:
- Fraud is evolving faster than manual processes: Even strong underwriting teams are vulnerable when fraud becomes industrialized. The cost of review rises and the member experience suffers if institutions over-correct with friction.
- Verification is becoming a data and model problem: As fraud techniques scale, competitive defenses look more like continuous verification and anomaly detection rather than one-time document checks.
- Vendor claims need governance discipline: AI fraud tools are attractive, but credit unions still need model and vendor oversight. That includes clear performance metrics, false positive monitoring, and auditability.
This investment is also a signal of where private capital sees near-term value in AI: tools that reduce loss and protect lending economics, not just productivity gains.
Credit union impact
Credit unions evaluating growth in auto, consumer, or mortgage lending should expect greater scrutiny on verification and fraud controls. AI fraud tools are increasingly positioned as core infrastructure, not a nice-to-have add-on.