David Barnhardt and I recently completed research sponsored by BioCatch to examine how fraud prevention will evolve through 2030. We surveyed 114 fraud executives across the U.S., Germany, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE, and what we found reveals both a universal challenge and a fragmented response that should concern anyone working in financial crime prevention.
The headline is startling: 96% of fraud executives expect AI-powered threats to increase over the next five years. But here’s what’s more interesting, and more troubling: regional expectations around how to respond to this threat vary significantly. When criminal organizations increasingly operate with global coordination while efforts to mobilize and orchestrate meaningful responses to them remain fragmented by jurisdictional boundaries and market characteristics, gaps in the scope, scale, and quality of fraud trends, as well as the market forces that shape investment in fraud controls, will widen as global criminal syndicates grow and evolve.
The Five Forces Defining 2030
Our research identified five interconnected market forces reshaping fraud prevention globally:
The AI arms race intensifies: To modify a quote by Homer Simpson, “AI is the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems.” AI represents both the greatest threat fraud executives face and their most promising defensive solution. This paradox forces fraud executives into a new and challenging arms race in which they must simultaneously build AI capabilities to defend against a rising tide of AI-powered attacks that most fraud executives believe is outpacing their capacity to control. Only about one-third of fraud executives believe solution providers maintain a sophistication advantage over fraudsters, and more than two-fifths indicate that fraudsters are equally or more sophisticated. While many remain optimistic that the good guys will eventually overcome widening gaps in adoption, most fraud executives who participated in our research reveal a variety of concerns that criminal organizations have an early lead and appear to be better able to adopt, operationalize, and scale the use of AI tools than they are.
Perceptions of regulatory liability are increasingly influential in shaping strategy: Expectations of regulatory pressures are emerging as the dominant driver of fraud prevention strategies. Nearly three-quarters of executives agree that financial institutions face more constraints in AI adoption than fraudsters. Regional regulatory approaches create very different incentive structures: Singapore’s proactive shared responsibility framework generates measurable returns through information-sharing platforms, while Brazil’s reactive Joint Resolution No. 6 creates liability pressure. Germany’s systematic PSD3 compliance requirements emphasize individual capability building. These differences in approaches are likely to result in making fraud relatively easy for criminal syndicates to execute in some markets than in others based on how effective these mobilization efforts are in terms of enabling fraud fighters to improve their prevention, detection, treatment, and prosecution of fraudsters.
Identity fraud replaces transaction fraud: The global fraud ecosystem is well on its way through its most significant structural transformation in decades as attacks shift from transaction-based techniques to identity-based methods. Approximately two-thirds of executives expect the majority of customer interactions to be digital within five years, with the kind of AI-mediated interactions that are expected to result from agentic commerce becoming the norm rather than the exception. Expectations appear to indicate that traditional transaction fraud patterns are likely to stabilize while identity-based attacks are likely to continue to surge across multiple threat vectors. This shift will continue to drive or even accelerate a greater emphasis and priority on identity life cycle management.
Collaboration becomes a necessity: Those in markets that have been fortunate to have opportunities to invest in information-sharing programs have confirmed what most have intuitively concluded about the benefits of collaborative-based fraud prevention. Regional perceptions of the benefit and necessity of collaborative information sharing vary noticeably, from nearly two-thirds in the U.S. to about one-third in Germany. Singapore’s efforts to expand an information-sharing platform demonstrate what one fraud executive described as “several million Singapore dollars in savings.” While regulatory constraints to making improvements in collaborative information remain to be perceived as significant barriers in some markets, most notably in the U.S., engineering challenges are also revealed as a notable concern, with 34% of fraud executives pointing out that technical challenges limit their efforts to collaborate effectively.
Perceptions of talent shortages are influencing expectations: Fraud executives are grappling with concerns over the pipeline of talent that they expect to rely on to succeed them in leadership roles over the next five years. This challenge is expected to influence and be influenced by AI adoption. Regional differences in investment priorities reflect differing approaches to overcoming talent constraints. In the U.S., fraud executives are mixed in their expectations of how the talent gap will influence their capacity to effectively manage fraud. In contrast, Singaporean fraud executives reflect confidence in their ability to overcome the challenges of the talent gap through targeted investments in operational efficiency improvements made primarily through AI-enabled automation. Few executives expect an excess of qualified fraud leadership candidates within five years, forcing organizations to reframe AI implementation around talent multiplication rather than pure capability enhancement.
Why Market Fragmentation Creates Systemic Risk
When a consensus emerges that fraud will increase at scale and that criminals are innovating faster than fraud fighters are but the pace and intensity of mobilization and responses to these increases diverge as much as they appear to be from one market to another, it leads me to believe that these gaps are likely to widen across markets and in such a manner that will result in some markets experiencing disproportionately high rates of attacks and losses relative to others.
Consider the liability question. Brazilian executives show the highest expectations for enhanced collaboration (78% vs. 67% elsewhere) and lead in expecting policy shifts like the emergence of card-like authorization functions in real-time payment systems (44% vs. 22% elsewhere). Meanwhile, in Germany, privacy regulations require data “obfuscation” that reduces fraud pattern recognition effectiveness. U.S. organizations demonstrate notable skepticism about external collaboration, particularly with technology companies and social media platforms.
These aren’t just cultural differences, they’re structural variations that create different defensive capabilities across markets. When sophisticated organized crime groups (such as Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital, which operates what one executive described as “advanced laboratories” for smartphone-based fraud) can coordinate globally while our responses remain fragmented, the criminals gain systematic advantages.
The data bears this out. Expectations for specific fraud types vary wildly: Brazilian executives show significantly higher concern about consumer payment scams compared to other regions, while German executives demonstrate the most acute cybersecurity awareness, expecting far more growth in ransomware and business email compromise than their U.S. counterparts. These different threat perceptions drive different investment priorities, creating markets that excel at defending against some threats while remaining vulnerable to others.
What Fraud Executives Should Do Now
Understanding these dynamics becomes essential for planning strategic investments and building the coalitions necessary to close capability gaps. Consider these suggestions:
Know your market’s position: Fraud executives need to understand where their market stands relative to these five forces. Are you in a market that encourages collaboration? Do the regulators in your market support or constrain information sharing? If you are in a market where collaboration is substantively constrained, then consider investing more energy into advocating for building support for mobilization and recruiting greater support from senior leadership within your institution but also from senior leadership among companies that share exposure (or the potential for exposure) to increased fraud activity in the next five years.
Build internal coalitions around external necessity: Many of the fraud executives we spoke with understand that overcoming barriers to information sharing and meaningful collaboration requires internal advocacy first. Use market-specific data about threat evolution and peer responses to make the case for expanding collaborative approaches to mobilization. When 62% of U.S. executives support information sharing but system integration remains the top challenge, the problem isn’t willingness—it’s organizational capability and prioritization.
Engage beyond banking: The fraud ecosystem extends far beyond financial institutions. Telecommunications companies, law enforcement, regulators, and tech platforms all play critical roles. Australian regulators are exploring models that place liability on platforms whose systems are used in fraud commission, even if far “upstream” from the theft event. While contentious, this ecosystemwide thinking acknowledges that fraud prevention requires participation from every entity that touches the customer journey.
Focus on adaptation speed over current excellence: Organizations that develop superior capability for rapid technology evaluation, implementation, and optimization will gain persistent advantages over those optimizing for specific technologies. When criminal AI capabilities advance faster than defensive technology development cycles, the ability to continually adapt becomes more valuable than achieving excellence in current approaches.
Markets that achieve effective coordination between financial institutions, regulators, technology providers, and law enforcement create sustainable competitive advantages. Singapore’s collaborative frameworks demonstrate measurable returns. The U.K.’s hackathon approach to information-sharing innovation shows what regulatory leadership can enable.
The question isn’t whether fraud will increase through 2030—96% of executives already know it will. The question is whether your market will develop the collaborative capabilities, regulatory frameworks, and organizational agility to respond effectively. Understanding how your market compares to others in addressing these five forces isn’t just strategic intelligence, it’s the foundation for building the internal and external coalitions necessary to close the gap.
For detailed regional comparisons and strategic recommendations for navigating fraud prevention through 2030, please see our recent report, Five Forces Disrupting Global Fraud Prevention by 2030.
