Italian banking leaders report increasing fraud attempts and losses

Three-quarters of respondents say their bank loses more than $10 million a year to fraud

ROME (Nov. 4, 2026) — A new survey of 100 fraud management, anti-money laundering (AML), and compliance team leaders at banks in Italy finds 68% of respondents say fraud losses at their institution are increasing, with 21% describing those increases as “significant.” More than three-quarters of those surveyed (76%) say their organization loses more than $10 million to fraud each year. That’s 25 percentage points above the global average and the highest percentage among any of the 17 countries surveyed.

“A substantial majority (78%) of Italian banking leaders appear to believe Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) credit transfers will increase fraud risk at their institution,” BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Thomas Peacock said. “This sentiment is almost unanimous among C-suite leaders we surveyed. With PSD3 poised to place scam reimbursement liability on banks, any increased fraud risk brought about by SEPA may also impact a bank’s bottom line.”

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of those surveyed say their institution is already planning or implementing changes to internal reimbursement policies to prepare for PSD3. Voluntary reimbursement among Italian banks also appears more common than it does in other countries, with two-thirds of those surveyed saying their organization already reimburses more than half of scam victims — 22 percentage points above the global average and among the highest of any country surveyed.

Other key report findings:

• Scams seen as top threat: More than half (53%) of respondents identified social engineering scams as a top three threat facing their institution, with 18% ranking scams as the No. 1 risk.
• Scams are mobile: The most common scam-origination channels in Italy are all mobile ones. Italian banking leaders identified messaging apps (54%), social media (48%), and other phone apps (47%) as the most prominent threats.
• Investigations are slow: An overwhelming 91% of those surveyed say fraud investigations take more than a day to complete, with nearly one-third of respondents reporting investigation timelines of longer than two days

BioCatch, which prevents fraud and financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, commissioned this and 11 other surveys of a combined 1,200 banking leaders across 17 countries. All respondents are manager level or above and work in their bank’s fraud or financial crime department.

Click here to download the complete report.

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About BioCatch:

BioCatch prevents fraud and financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior, continuously collecting more than 3,000 anonymized data points — keystroke and mouse activity, touch screen behavior, AI agent usage, jailbroken devices, and more — as people interact with their digital banking platforms. With these inputs, BioCatch's AI and machine-learning models continuously assess both user intent and any signs of coercion or manipulation throughout every millisecond of every digital banking session, allowing banks to distinguish the criminal from the legitimate in real time. Insights drawn from across the entire network of BioCatch institutions further amplify the power and accuracy of that real-time risk-scoring. As of the end of Q3 2026, more than 400 financial institutions deploy BioCatch solutions, analyzing 20 billion user sessions per month and protecting more than 760 million users on more than 1.8 billion devices around the world from fraud and financial crime.

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PR contact:

Mac King
BioCatch director of global marketing communications
Mac.King@BioCatch.com