BioCatch, a fraud and financial crime prevention company that identifies patterns in human behaviour, has published research warning that AI is fundamentally reshaping the threat landscape for UK banks, with the vast majority of fraud professionals reporting that scams are growing more sophisticated and increasingly difficult to separate from legitimate digital activity.
The UK findings, drawn from survey responses from 80 fraud-management, financial crime prevention, and risk and compliance professionals, reveal that 84% believe AI has heightened the complexity of fraud and scam activity.
Three-quarters said differentiating between legitimate AI-assisted banking behaviour and malicious or manipulated actions will be very challenging, while 73% reported a rise in fraud attempts at their institution and 64% said losses from fraud are also climbing. A further 76% indicated that access to real-time intelligence on receiving accounts would significantly strengthen their ability to identify and prevent scams.
The research forms part of a wider global BioCatch survey covering 1,440 fraud-management, anti-money laundering, and risk and compliance leaders at banks across 25 countries on five continents. Globally, 84% of respondents consider AI agents to represent the industry’s single greatest exploitable vulnerability over the coming year, 88% say AI has already raised the sophistication of fraud schemes, and 72% believe it will be very difficult to tell apart legitimate AI-assisted actions from malicious or manipulated AI activity in a world where AI agents routinely initiate transactions. Additionally, 60% expect AI-mediated banking to erode the effectiveness of existing fraud defences.
The report also documents a marked acceleration in fraud globally. In the 2025 edition of the survey, 71% of respondents said fraud attempts at their organisation were increasing; by 2026, that figure had risen to 81%. The proportion reporting year-on-year growth in fraud losses climbed from 59% to 76% over the same period. Close to half of those surveyed said their organisation loses in excess of $10m to fraud annually, with 20% reporting losses above $25m and 5% above $50m.
There is also strong appetite for industry collaboration. Some 86% of respondents globally said that access to real-time intelligence on the receiving account in interbank transactions would improve their bank’s ability to stop scams, while 85% said interbank information-sharing would help combat fraud and financial crime more broadly. This is particularly relevant given that many scams originate outside the banking session itself, and that stolen funds are frequently moved rapidly through mule accounts, making receiving-account intelligence a key tool in preventing losses before they become irreversible.
The survey participants, all of whom were manager-level or above and 79% of whom held director-level roles or higher, with 23% sitting in their bank’s C-suite, also flagged concerns around friction. Globally, 68% of banking leaders said their institution’s approach to fraud prevention and reimbursement has resulted in a net loss of customers. Of those, 56% attributed customer attrition to unreimbursed losses, while 44% pointed to excessive friction in the customer experience. On the question of fraud velocity, 76% of global respondents said they were very concerned about the accelerating pace of fraudulent activity, compared to 70% of UK respondents.
Notably, UK respondents reported lower levels of claim rejections and customer losses than the global average. Only 19% of UK respondents said their organisation rejects more than $5m in fraud claims annually, against 59% globally. Just 14% said their bank’s customers lose more than $10m to fraud and scams each year, well below the 39% global average. The research also found that 80% of respondents globally said their institution had already encountered attacks using agentic AI, and that more than 96% said their institution currently measures customer attrition specifically linked to fraud and scam experiences, with 39% identifying it as a primary driver of investment decisions.
BioCatch prevents fraud and financial crime by analysing patterns in human behaviour. The company serves financial institutions globally, protecting more than 660 million banking customers and processing more than 17 billion monthly user sessions across more than 1.6 billion unique devices.
BioCatch Global Advisory, EMEA Jonathan Frost said, “Agentic AI is making fraud faster, more scalable, and harder to detect. UK banks should prioritise early prevention in the payment process. Although strong reimbursement rules protect victims after fraud, they do not prevent emotional harm, disrupt mule accounts, or stop criminals from profiting. Criminals will inevitably use AI, potentially leading to exponential growth in fraud. Only behavioural insights, shared in real time across the sector, can detect customer manipulation, assess user intent, identify mules, and support a risk-based approach to friction.”
BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor said, “AI is starting to reshape how customers interact with e-commerce sites and financial institutions and will change how criminals execute fraud and other financial crimes. As digital interactions continue to grow faster, more automated, and increasingly driven by agents, we must move beyond static identity checks and toward a deeper and immediate understanding of behaviour, intent, and trust.”
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