Fraudsters stole more than £629m from UK consumers and businesses in just six months during 2025, highlighting how rapidly organised fraud continues to adapt despite significant industry investment in prevention and detection. The reality is fraud operates as an ecosystem, and the industry’s response must do the same.
The payments industry has never invested more heavily in fraud prevention than it does today. Artificial intelligence is improving detection rates, regulation is driving greater accountability, and merchants, acquirers and banks are dedicating significant resources to tackling financial crime.
Yet despite billions spent on fraud prevention, fraud losses remain stubbornly high. The uncomfortable reality is that the industry continues to invest heavily in defending organisations while fraudsters focus on exploiting the gaps between them.
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The challenge is that fraud constantly adapts. Every time the industry strengthens one area of defence, criminal networks move to another. When controls improved around authorised push payment fraud, other fraud types increased. When one sector becomes harder to attack, fraud migrates to another with weaker controls. Criminals are coordinated, agile and opportunistic. Criminals collaborate more effectively than many legitimate organisations. While banks, merchants, platforms and processors optimise their own defences, fraudsters share tools, techniques and intelligence across networks.
This is why fraud should not be viewed as a problem belonging to any single organisation. Most fraud begins long before a payment is processed. UK Finance reports that 66% of authorised push payment fraud cases originate online and a further 17% originate through telecommunications channels, reinforcing the point that much of the fraud journey begins well before a payment reaches the banking system. The customer may have been targeted through social media, a fake website, a messaging platform, a phone call, or a stolen credential obtained months earlier. By the time a suspicious transaction reaches a payment processor, the attack has already crossed multiple organisations and channels.
The intelligence needed to understand that journey is distributed across banks, payment providers, merchants, technology platforms, and network operators. No single participant has a complete picture. Organised fraud succeeds in the gaps between organisations, where information is disconnected and detection efforts are isolated.
The industry continues to organise fraud prevention around company structures that fraudsters neither recognise nor respect. As long as intelligence remains trapped inside organisations, fraud will continue to exploit the blind spots between them. Fraud already functions as a coordinated ecosystem. The industry’s defence must become one too.
What can merchants control?
Merchants sit at the centre of the customer transaction journey. They initiate, validate, and fulfil transactions while maintaining some of the richest sources of customer and behavioural data available anywhere in the payments ecosystem. That position creates both responsibility and opportunity.
Improving fraud visibility starts internally. In many organisations, fraud, finance and operational teams work from different data sources and priorities. Bringing those perspectives together creates a clearer understanding of risk and enables faster decision-making. It also creates stronger intelligence that can be shared externally when needed.
Merchants often hold some of the richest fraud intelligence in the ecosystem, yet too much of that intelligence never leaves the organisation where it was discovered. Practical steps can start immediately: establish regular intelligence-sharing reviews with payment providers, ensure fraud, finance and operations teams work from a common view of risk, participate actively in industry bodies such as the Merchant Risk Council, and contribute intelligence to consortium and sector-wide fraud initiatives where appropriate. Sharing suspicious transaction patterns quickly can help disrupt attacks before they spread further
Industry intelligence-sharing forums, consortium models, and sector bodies already demonstrate the benefits of collective visibility. The challenge is scaling that collaboration faster than fraudsters can evolve. The conversation around fraud prevention often focuses on technology, which is important, but is only part of the story.
People, data, defence
The industry has become increasingly enthusiastic about AI as the future of fraud prevention. That enthusiasm is justified, but it is sometimes misunderstood.
AI can process more data, identify more patterns, and make decisions faster than any human team. Governments and regulators increasingly view AI as a strategic capability, but its effectiveness still depends on the quality of the underlying data and intelligence ecosystem. What it cannot do is compensate for incomplete intelligence. AI is not a fraud strategy. It amplifies whatever intelligence it is given. If the underlying intelligence is incomplete, AI simply allows organisations to make poor decisions faster and at greater scale.
Fraud evolves faster than most organisations adapt. Criminal networks continuously test new attack methods, shifting tactics before historical models have enough data to recognise them. An AI model is only as effective as the information it receives. If that information is incomplete, siloed or outdated, the results will be too.
This is where human expertise remains essential. Experienced fraud teams are often the first to recognise that something has changed before the data is widespread enough for automated systems to identify it. Their value is not in competing with AI. It is in improving it, challenging assumptions, identifying emerging threats and ensuring models remain aligned to a rapidly evolving threat environment.
The strongest fraud programmes are rarely those with the most technology. They are usually those with the broadest visibility into the threat landscape. The industry often treats fraud intelligence as a competitive asset, yet fraudsters exploit that reluctance to share information as a competitive advantage of their own. Fraudsters do not care which organisation suffers the loss. They only care that the industry remains fragmented enough to let them move fraud elsewhere. The organisations most successful at reducing fraud combine machine intelligence with industry intelligence, drawing insights from partners, merchants, processors and fraud networks rather than relying solely on their own transaction data.
This becomes particularly important when balancing protection against customer experience. False declines already cost many businesses more than fraud losses. Every legitimate transaction rejected represents lost revenue, customer frustration and potential attrition. Getting that balance right requires visibility, context, and judgement as much as it requires technology.
The response is collective coordination
The payments industry’s biggest fraud challenge is no longer detecting attacks. It is creating the trust, governance, and incentives required to share intelligence quickly enough to stop them.
Technology will continue to play an increasingly important role in fraud prevention, and AI-driven detection is becoming a competitive necessity. However, the organisations most successful at managing fraud will not be those acting alone. They will be those contributing to and benefiting from a wider network of intelligence, expertise, and collaboration.
Better data shared faster. Stronger insight across organisational boundaries. Earlier identification of emerging threats. More accurate decision-making. Fewer false declines. That is what collective coordination delivers. Fraud is already coordinated. The uncomfortable question is whether the industry is prepared to become equally coordinated in its response.
Candice Pressinger, Director of Customer Data Security, Elavon Europe
