Key takeaway: AI-generated and AI-enhanced fraud attempts are now outpacing what legacy controls can catch. As a result, payment providers, processors and merchants should prepare for corporate finance teams and their banks to push for more cross-institution fraud-detection data sharing, rather than fixes confined to a single company’s systems.
81% of senior finance leaders say their company has faced an attempted fraud involving AI-generated or AI-enhanced content or techniques in the past year. This is according to a survey of 230 executives released by Early Warning Services’ fraud-prevention unit, Certos. A similar share, 79%, said they were very concerned that AI-enabled fraud could negatively affect trust in their organization.
Certos surveyed senior financial leaders online from Aug. 7 to Aug. 21, drawing 79 responses from Fortune 500 companies. 127 also came from venture-backed companies and 24 from charitable organizations, while excluding banks, credit unions, investment managers, financial services and fintech firms, and companies working on AI model development or AI services.
Asked about their biggest open-ended concern around AI-enabled fraud, 43% of respondents pointed to payment diversion, 38% cited detection gaps or control lags, and 21% named executive deepfake impersonation. 84% said AI-enabled fraud is harder to detect than traditional fraud, and while 87% felt prepared for the sophistication of AI-enabled scams, only half were confident they could catch such fraud before money left the organization.
93% said AI-enabled fraud risk is changing how their organization thinks about its financial institution partners, and 51% named better detection of suspicious activity as a top expectation of those partners. Certos General Manager Ben Chance said banks need shared, inter-bank network intelligence to confirm that a receiving account truly belongs to the person or business the sender intends to pay before money leaves the sending bank.
Why it matters: The survey shows AI-enabled fraud, from deepfake executive impersonation to fabricated payment instructions, is becoming a shared burden across the payments ecosystem. With most corporate finance leaders already reporting an AI-related fraud attempt and a majority looking to their banks for better detection, payment processors, card networks and eCommerce platforms should expect growing pressure to share fraud-detection signals across institutions.
Sources: Payments Dive (first published by CFO.com)
