Nearly 4 in 10 say their bank loses more than $25 million to fraud every year
STOCKHOLM (Aug. 26, 2026) — A new survey of 100 fraud-management, anti-money laundering (AML), and compliance team leaders at banks in the Nordics finds more than two-thirds (67%) of those leaders believe fraud losses at their institution are increasing. The sum of those losses also appears significant, with 39% of respondents in the region reporting annual losses in excess of $25 million — a higher share than in every other country BioCatch surveyed except the Netherlands.
“BankID, MitID, and Mobile Certificate have helped make digital banking remarkably secure and convenient across the Nordics, but successful authentication cannot tell a bank whether a customer has been manipulated into making a payment,” BioCatch Senior Manager for the Nordics Gareth Williams said. “As liability standards evolve, financial institutions will need to look beyond whether the right person authorized a transaction and instead understand what drove that person to act.”
Nordic banking leaders identify workflow fragmentation and manual workloads as the most common operational challenges facing fraud teams, with staffing constraints also ranking among the top concerns. Yet, even as fraud losses appear to grow at most institutions in the region, those surveyed continue to express confidence in their fraud defenses, with 80% rating their current controls as “effective,” including nearly half (48%) who describe them as “very effective.”
The survey was commissioned by BioCatch, which prevents fraud and financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior.
Other key findings:
- Social engineering dominates fraud origination: More than half (51%) of respondents rank social media among the top three channels fraudsters use to engage victims, followed closely by phone calls (49%).
- Protecting trust is a top priority: Sixty-eight percent of respondents say the reputational impact of fraud and scams concerns them as much as or more than financial losses.
- Banks are ready for the next phase of digital banking: Eighty-seven percent of respondents say their organization is at least mostly ready for new manipulated payment liability standards tied to digital ID systems such as BankID and MitID.
Download the report to view the complete results.
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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 H1 2026, more than 370 financial institutions deploy BioCatch solutions, analyzing 19 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