Singapore – More than half of banking leaders across Asia Pacific lack confidence in their institutions’ ability to detect when customers are being manipulated into making a payment, according to a new report by FICO.
The poll was conducted in August 2026 during FICO’s Banking Leaders Forum in Bali, capturing responses from 51 senior executives and C-suite leaders at leading banks across Asia Pacific.
The survey found that 51% of banking leaders are not confident their bank can detect customer manipulation before a payment is made. Of that figure, 49% described themselves as “not very confident” and 2% as “not confident at all.”
By contrast, only 2% of respondents said they are “very confident” in their bank’s ability to spot manipulation before funds move, while 46% described themselves as only “somewhat confident.”
The findings point to a shift in how scams are being carried out. Rather than attempting to defeat a bank’s security controls directly, criminals are increasingly persuading legitimate customers to authorise payments themselves.
“Scammers are increasingly manipulating legitimate customers into authorising payments themselves, rather than trying to defeat the bank’s security controls directly,” said Dattu Kompella, Managing Director in Asia Pacific for FICO.
“As AI makes social engineering more convincing and personalised, banks need to recognise changes in customer behaviour and intervene before the money leaves the account,” he added.
Despite the confidence gap, banking leaders showed strong support for early intervention once warning signs emerge.
When asked at what point banks should step in after detecting behavioural red flags, 77% of respondents backed immediate action as soon as signals indicate significant risk.
A further 10% favoured warning customers while still allowing them to decide whether to proceed, while 5% said they would wait for strong evidence that a scam is under way. Only 8% would intervene solely once a suspicious transaction is attempted.
However, the survey also exposes a gap between this appetite for early action and the tools currently available to act on it. More than half of respondents, 54%, identified stronger behavioural analytics and connected fraud intelligence as the most important capability for improving scam detection and prevention.
“Scam prevention requires banks to look earlier in the journey,” Kompella said. “Changes in where or how a customer sends payments, navigates their account, sets up beneficiaries or behaves digitally can provide important signals that something is wrong.”
“Banks then need to act on those signals quickly, including engaging the customer before the payment occurs,” he added.
Beyond internal analytics, the survey also highlighted difficulties in coordinating intelligence across industries. Some 39% of respondents pointed to the inability to share intelligence quickly enough across banks, telecommunications providers and social media platforms as a major weakness in current scam prevention efforts.
“No organisation sees the entire scam journey,” Kompella said. “A scam may begin on a social media platform, move through a telecommunications network and ultimately result in a payment between financial institutions.”
“By the time those signals are connected, the funds may already be gone,” he added.
Looking ahead, banking leaders expect the scam landscape to grow more sophisticated over the next three years, with artificial intelligence identified as the leading concern.
Nearly half of respondents, 46%, named AI-generated personalised scam messages and conversations as the emerging threat that concerns them most.
A further 28% pointed to the growth of criminal “scam-as-a-service” platforms, which give criminals access to increasingly sophisticated scam infrastructure and capabilities.
Smaller shares of respondents flagged other emerging risks: 10% cited the growth of organised mule-account networks, 8% pointed to deepfake voice and video impersonation, and another 8% selected attacks against biometric authentication.
Against this backdrop, fraud and scam prevention emerged as the top priority for AI or agentic decisioning, selected by 75% of the banking leaders surveyed.
Turning that priority into practice remains a challenge, though. Nearly half of respondents, 47%, identified data and infrastructure limitations as a barrier to scaling AI-driven decisioning, while 43% cited legacy systems and integration issues.
