JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (May 13, 2026) — A new survey of fraud-management, anti-money laundering (AML), and compliance team leaders at South African banks depicts a country still searching for a solution to meaningfully reduce an onslaught of fraud. Three-fourths of those surveyed (75%) report increasing fraud attempts at their institution, 79% say fraud losses were increasing, and 81% estimate their institution’s annual fraud losses at more than $5 million (R82.3 million). Those percentages increased among C-suite respondents, with 81% reporting increasing fraud attempts, 84% increasing fraud losses, and 86% annual fraud losses in excess of $5 million.
“More South African banking leaders reported rising fraud attempts, rising fraud losses, and annual fraud losses exceeding $5 million than their counterparts at financial institutions elsewhere in the world,” BioCatch Director of Global Fraud Intelligence Thomas Peacock said. "Among the 17 countries we surveyed on this topic, an average of 61% of respondents reported an increase in annual fraud attempts, 60% said fraud losses were increasing at their institution, and 73% said their bank's losses exceeded $5 million.”
This survey was commissioned by BioCatch, which prevents fraud and financial crime by recognizing patterns in human behavior. South African banking leaders overwhelmingly (78%) rank their concern over the reputational risk posed by fraud and scams as greater than or equal to their concern about the financial impact of fraud and scams.
“Fraudsters increasingly no longer break into banks,” BioCatch Global Advisory Director Jonathan Frost said. “Instead, they manipulate customers’ cognitive and emotional states to override rational judgment. Social engineering has become the primary attack vector, bypassing the billions invested in technological defenses. Criminals have industrialized deception, exploiting trust, urgency, and fear with a sophistication that surpasses that of public awareness efforts and one-time passwords. The question is not whether you can afford to protect your customers from social engineering, but whether you can afford not to. Customers are not a vulnerability to manage. They are an asset to protect. When customers incur losses due to fraud, banks also lose deposits, trust, and legitimacy.”
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 Q1 2026, more than 30 of the world's largest 100 banks and 357 total financial institutions deploy BioCatch solutions, analyzing 18 billion user sessions per month and protecting more than 680 million accounts accessed from more than 1.7 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