The Payments Association’s Benjamin David tells the Payment Expert Podcast AI-enabled fraud is outpacing industry defences, and the response depends on intelligence sharing across the sector rather than firms building their defences alone.
Benjamin David, Head of Intelligence at The Payments Association, told the Payment Expert Podcast AI-enabled fraud is outpacing the industry’s response and that firms cannot solve the problem individually.
The Payments Association surveyed 100 senior financial crime leaders across UK financial services for its UK Financial Crime Pulse 2026 report.
Some 76% of those who have encountered AI-enabled fraud said it is increasing faster than their organisation can respond, David said, the largest perceived response gap of any risk in the research.
AI has not invented financial crime, David said. Social engineering, impersonation and attempts to manipulate people into making payments predate it. AI changes the economics and speed of those techniques, making them quicker to run, easier to scale and more convincing. Criminals can test and change methods quickly, while a regulated firm must clear governance, compliance and risk requirements before deploying new technology, which leaves defenders slower than attackers.
David said financial crime is becoming more distributed and in some areas more industrialised. Fraud as a service lowers the barrier to entry, he said, letting capabilities which once required specialist knowledge reach a wider group, so different actors in a criminal network can supply tools, information or infrastructure without each holding every capability.
The Payments Association: financial crime is a network problem
The threat is not uniform across financial services. The Payments Association report rates APP fraud, or authorised push payment fraud, the most severe challenge to firms’ financial crime functions, though not the most commonly experienced; insider fraud is the most widespread at 78%.
Banks were more likely to name digital identity and know-your-customer weaknesses as their most significant risk, at 63%, while fintechs were more likely to name fraud prevention as their leading source of operational uncertainty.
41% of organisations said AI governance is the area of financial crime that most lacks practical implementation guidance, ahead of crypto compliance at 37%, David said.
Responsibility sits across regulators, firms, technology providers and industry bodies rather than one part of the sector, and good governance should give firms the confidence to innovate rather than prevent it.
Firms have built defences institution by institution while criminals exploit the connections between them. David gave mule accounts as an example: one firm sees a suspicious account, another sees a linked transaction, and combining those signals reveals a network no single institution could see alone.
Barriers to moving that intelligence include data protection, liability, commercial sensitivity and technical interoperability, though not every barrier is immovable, he said..
The UK Financial Crime Pulse 2026 draws on an Opinium survey of 100 senior UK financial services decision-makers.
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