Implementation Lead

Element451 introduces Bolt Fraud Detection and Resolution, an agentic solution built with Socure to close the gap on higher education fraud. Updated Oct 01, 2026 Built in partnership with Socure's identity verification technology, the new product will expand on Element451's fraud detection capabilities, putting AI agents to work to help combat a fraud problem now costing higher education millions nationwide. RALEIGH, N.C., September 29, 2026 - Element451, the AI platform built for higher education, today announced Bolt Fraud Detection and Resolution, the next evolution of its fraud detection capabilities. Bolt Fraud Detection and Resolution will continuously monitor applicant and student data, in tandem with Socure to verify identity and investigate unusual or suspicious activity, while then taking follow-up action directly, and coordinating with staff toward a final decision. The partnership with Socure, the leading AI-native trust infrastructure for global identity and risk intelligence, brings its fraud and identity signals to the center of that work. Fraud has become a significant financial and legal risk to higher education institutions, as well as a barrier to access for legitimate students. Detection technology alone isn't keeping pace. Schemes are evolving faster than institutions can manually chase evidence, verify identities, and follow up with applicants. The Department of Education's Inspector General has said "ghost student" fraud cost taxpayers at least $350 million over the past five years. Fraud Detection and Resolution will address exactly that gap, with AI agents acting on behalf of staff to keep every case moving. Fraud Detection and Resolution will give staff a coordinated workflow for screening, verification, review, and follow-up. Instead of a process that ends at the fraud flag, staff will be able to see why a record needs attention, review the available evidence, request identity verification, and document the outcome. An AI agent will then handle the follow-up work, coordinating verification requests and surfacing unresolved cases for review, so nothing sits untouched while staff keep full control of the outcome. From detection to decision. Schools have traditionally combated fraud through systems built to flag a suspicious application. To block as much fraud as possible, those systems are often tuned to catch anything unusual, which means legitimate students can get flagged too, and risk being delayed or blocked from registering or receiving aid. Once a flag goes up, staff are left to do the rest, chasing down evidence across disconnected systems, tracking down the applicant for verification, and documenting a decision, often while the case sits with no clear owner as it moves between staff. For institutions already stretched thin, that gap between detection and resolution is where fraud slips through, and where legitimate students can get caught in it. Fraud Detection and Resolution is designed for AI to do the legwork and staff to make the call. The agent handles the manual work that eats up staff hours, while the final fraud determination, along with any admissions or financial-aid decision, stays with the people accountable for it. "For schools, this isn't just about catching fraud, it's about maintaining student access and alleviating the tremendous pressure administrators have to catch and act on every single potential case. Pairing Socure's identity technology with our Bolt agents means institutions can augment their team with powerful AI agents utilizing the most accurate and extensive fraud detection technology available," said Ty Fujimura, Chief Product Officer at Element451. Element451 chose Socure to build on its existing fraud detection capabilities and strengthen the identity verification at the center of Fraud Detection and Resolution. Socure's identity technology is used by the U.S. Department of Education to secure the FAFSA process nationwide, and its platform is able to verify up to 98% of applicants. Its fraud models are also built to catch patterns common across higher education and ghost students, including high risk emails, repurposed phones, high-risk digital traffic, and coordinated fake identities across applications. "Fraud in higher education is becoming more sophisticated, more coordinated, and harder for institutions to address through manual processes alone," said Jordan Burris, Head of Public Sector at Socure. Its partnership with Element451 brings together identity intelligence and agentic workflows to help institutions move from detecting suspicious activity to resolving it faster and with greater confidence. For institutions, that means catching more fraud earlier and resolving questionable cases without adding more manual work for already stretched teams." How Fraud Detection and Resolution works. Fraud Detection and Resolution is designed for the admissions, enrollment, and fraud-review staff who investigate suspicious applications and contact records, whether their institution runs on Element451's AI CRM, another CRM or student information system, or an existing fraud detection tool. Rather than adding another tool to check, it fits directly into the review work already underway, giving staff a clear owner and a documented outcome for every case. Institutional data remains fully confidential, processed in Socure's FedRAMP-certified environment. Here's how that may look at an institution: * An application is flagged as moderate-risk, prompting staff to review the evidence, identify what's missing, and coordinate verification before documenting an outcome. * When a record needs a second look, staff can request a live video appointment to further validate identity, while keeping every earlier attempt on file. * After enrollment, whenever Bolt detects unusual activity or changes to a student's data, Bolt will use Socure's technology to assess the risk and take appropriate action in coordination with staff. * When a case remains unresolved, staff get an owned investigation, with the evidence, communications, and verification attempts already in place. * For institutions on an existing CRM, student information system, or fraud tool, records flow in through a supported integration, and outcomes reconcile back to the source system. The results are already showing up at schools using Element451's existing fraud detection capabilities. At Galveston College in Texas, the platform has flagged more than 1,100 potentially fraudulent applications out of over 6,200 received in just over a year, nearly 90% of which have held up as fraudulent on review. "Before Element451, we were manually combing through applications trying to spot inconsistencies, like a birth date that didn't line up with a high school graduation year, and I'm sure we missed a lot of fraud in the process. Now we catch it early and can act with confidence. Without that, we'd likely be finding these cases too late, after financial aid funds were already gone," said Scott Branum, Director of Admissions and Registrar at Galveston College Element451 is inviting admissions and enrollment leaders to connect now to talk through how Fraud Detection and Resolution fits into their strategy. For a first look at Fraud Detection and Resolution, come see Element451 at EDUCAUSE. About Element451. Element451 delivers AI products purpose-built for higher education. Bolt is the AI Agent Engine for higher education, deploying specialized agents across every stage of the student lifecycle to drive outcomes for institutions and students alike. Element is the AI-native CRM for higher education, connecting data, workflows, and AI agents across every team and every stage of the student journey. Element451 supports more than 350 institutions in powering over 60 million student journeys, including Columbia University, Louisiana State University, Tulane University, the North Carolina Community College System, and the University System of Georgia. About Socure. Socure is the leading AI-native trust infrastructure, providing identity and risk intelligence to the world. Socure is trusted by the largest enterprises and government agencies to build trust and mitigate risk with its identity verification, compliance and fraud prevention solutions. Leveraging AI and machine learning, Socure achieves the highest accuracy, automation, and capture rates in the industry. Serving more than 3,000 customers and 190+ countries across financial services, government, gaming, healthcare, telecom, and e-commerce, Socure's customer base includes the top five U.S. banks, four of the Mag 7, the largest HR payroll and workforce providers, four of the five largest U.S. crypto exchanges, the largest sportsbook and prediction market operators, 160 organizations across the public sector, and more than 600 fintechs. Leading organizations trust Socure to deliver certainty in identity across onboarding, authentication, payments, account changes, and regulatory compliance. Learn more at www.socure.com.

Element451 has partnered with NVIDIA to develop AI models specifically for higher education, starting with improved student data management. The collaboration uses NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Super model to enhance Element451's agentic deduplication engine, which addresses duplicate student records that can cause conflicting messages and missed deadlines. Since introducing deduplication, Element451 has seen a 53% increase in user-confirmed merges. The integration with NVIDIA's open-source model reduces underlying model costs by up to 7x, making AI more accessible for resource-constrained institutions. The partnership allows admissions and student success teams to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time directly supporting students. Element451 and NVIDIA plan to explore additional collaborations using other Nemotron models for use cases including fraud detection. Element451 currently supports more than 350 institutions.

/C O R R E C T I O N - Encoura/. Jun 03, 2026, 12:16 ET In the news release, Encoura and Element451 Announce Strategic Partnership to Close Higher Ed's Gap Between Data Intelligence and Real-Time Action, issued 03-Jun-2026 by Encoura over PR Newswire, we are advised by the company that changes have been made. The complete, corrected release follows: Encoura and Element451 Announce Strategic Partnership to Close Higher Ed's Gap Between Data Intelligence and Real-Time Action. New partnership combines AI-native CRM and agents with robust analytics and proprietary research to turn student insights into meaningful engagement. AUSTIN, Texas, June 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Encoura, an industry-leading educational technology and research provider, and Element451, the AI platform and CRM purpose-built for higher ed, today announced a strategic partnership to create a seamless engagement ecosystem - Encoura Connect, built with Element451. Together, the two organizations are delivering what no single platform has offered higher ed before: a fully connected intelligence ecosystem where enrollment and retention combine with agentic AI to help institutions seamlessly manage and support the entire student lifecycle. Colleges and universities across the country are under mounting pressure. Institutions are being asked to recruit and retain students with fewer staff and dwindling budgets, while the data and tools they rely on are often trapped in separate, disconnected systems. The gap between knowing what to do and being able to act on it quickly has long been a structural drag on performance. This partnership directly addresses that disconnect by bringing Encoura's predictive models, proprietary research, and institutional insights inside Element451's AI-powered platform. "Having better insights and a better CRM sitting side by side would be a plus for our college and university partners, but we've gone even further," said Dennis Syracuse, CEO of Encoura. "This partnership means that for the first time, the collective insights we've built over decades are embedded directly into Encoura Connect - and supported by AI agents - into the workflows where institutions make decisions and take action. That's a fundamentally different kind of support." The partnership gives colleges and universities a connected experience where the right information is always in the right place. Institutions no longer have to move between systems to find insights and then apply them; the two now live together, eliminating the manual handoffs that have long slowed engagement operations. Encoura's predictive models are updated automatically based on real-time student activity, and Element451's Bolt agents proactively identify untapped strategic opportunities. At all times, the platform maintains the highest privacy and security standards, making it a trustworthy, all-in-one enrollment resource. "Element451 was built around how higher ed professionals work every day, rather than retrofitted from a different industry's enterprise software," said James Novak, CEO at Element451. "Pairing that with Encoura's depth of data and intelligence means our agents and workflows are informed by the best analytics in higher education and are ready to act on it." The result is a new enrollment and retention ecosystem that expands institutional capacity, reduces friction, and empowers enrollment and student success staff to spend less time managing systems and more time focused on building meaningful student connections that drive long-term institutional engagement. As higher education enters one of its most competitive enrollment periods in decades, Encoura and Element451 are positioning institutions to move from insight to action faster than ever before. Members of the media can contact Courtney Baumann at [email protected]. About Encoura Encoura is an educational technology, marketing, and research organization serving thousands of higher education institutions across the nation. Since 1972, Encoura has been a leading provider of strategic consulting, data science, and engagement solutions that connect institutions to the communities they serve. In 2025 and 2026, Encoura expanded its capabilities with its acquisition of Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) and Anthology's Lifecycle Engagement and Student Success portfolio. This combined expertise now spans enrollment, marketing, student success, alumni relations, and advancement, providing institutions with comprehensive solutions to achieve their goals throughout the student lifecycle. For more information, visit encoura.org. About Element451 Element451 delivers AI products purpose-built for higher education. Bolt is the AI Agent Engine for higher education, deploying specialized agents across every stage of the student lifecycle to drive outcomes for institutions and students alike. Element is the AI-native CRM for higher education, connecting data, workflows, and AI agents across every team and every stage of the student journey. Element451 supports more than 350 institutions, including Columbia University, Louisiana State University, Tulane University, the North Carolina Community College System, and the University System of Georgia. SOURCE Encoura