The future of digital trust
AI agents and the speed of fraud and financial crime
Digital trust in 2026 sits precariously at the center of economic stability, public confidence, and the security of our everyday online lives. In many places, it’s also eroding much faster than institutions, governments, and technology providers can rebuild it.
Fraud, scams, and financial crime now represent a full-blown global crisis, together operating as interconnected systems incomprehensible to legacy defenses. They undermine economies, governments, and communities of all sizes, all around the world.
To understand how FIs combat fraud and financial crime today, their expectations for the future, the impact of AI, and the state of collaboration across banking institutions, BioCatch surveyed 1,440 fraud management, financial crime prevention, and risk and compliance professionals at banks in 25 countries on five continents. To view those global findings in an interactive, ungated format, you can read the complete survey here: The future of digital trust: AI agents and the speed of fraud and financial crime.
A few of our global findings:
- Agentic AI a major concern: 84% of respondents believe AI agents could be the industry’s largest exploitable vulnerability in the next year, while 60% expect AI-mediated banking to reduce the effectiveness of traditional fraud defenses and 72% believe it will be very difficult to distinguish between legitimate AI-assisted actions and malicious or manipulated AI activity in a future where agents commonly initiate transactions.
- Fraud attempts and losses increasing everywhere: The percentage of respondents reporting increasing annual fraud attempts jumped from 71% in the 2025 version of this survey to 81% in 2026. Similarly, those reporting increasing annual fraud losses climbed from 59% to 76%.
- Appetite for collaboration: A majority of respondents (86%) say gaining real-time intelligence sharing on the receiving account in an interbank transaction would improve their bank’s ability to stop scams, while 85% say interbank intel-sharing would help it stop fraud and financial crime.
- Agentic AI attacks are already here: Four-fifths (80%) of respondents say their institution has already encountered attacks utilizing agentic AI.
- Customer trust is a priority: More than 96% of respondents say their institution already measures customer attrition specific to fraud and scam experiences, while 39% say it’s a primary driver of investment decisions.
- Blanket friction is a problem: More than two-thirds (68%) of banking leaders believe their organization’s approach to fraud and financial crime prevention and reimbursement has resulted in net loss of customers. While more than half (56%) attribute this loss of customers to unreimbursed losses, the remaining 44% blame any customer attrition at their institution on too much friction.
For the complete picture, download now or scroll through the interactive results today.
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