Senior banking leaders across Asia Pacific have identified a critical gap in scam prevention, with more than half lacking confidence that their banks can detect when customers are being manipulated or coerced before they transfer funds.

The poll, conducted by global analytics software leader FICO, found that 51% of banking leaders are not confident their bank can detect customer manipulation before a payment is made. This includes 49% who are “not very confident” and 2% who are “not confident at all.” Just 2% said they are “very confident,” while 46% are only “somewhat confident.”

“Scammers are increasingly manipulating legitimate customers into authorizing 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 personalized, banks need to recognize changes in customer behavior and intervene before the money leaves the account.”

Banks want to intervene earlier but lack the analytics

Banking leaders showed strong support for acting early when signs of a scam emerge.

When asked when banks should intervene after detecting behavioral warning signs, 77% supported immediate action as soon as those signals indicate a significant risk. A further 10% favored warning customers while generally allowing them to decide whether to proceed, while 5% would wait for strong evidence that a scam is underway. 8% would only intervene once a suspicious transaction is attempted.

The findings expose a gap between ambition and capability. While banking leaders overwhelmingly favor early intervention, 54% identified better behavioral analytics and connected fraud intelligence as the most important capability for detecting changes in customer behavior and improving scam prevention.

“Scam prevention requires banks to look earlier in the journey,” said Kompella. “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.”

The intelligence sharing gap

The survey also highlighted the challenge of coordinating scam intelligence across industries. 39% of respondents identified the inability to share intelligence quickly enough across banks, telecommunications providers and social media platforms as a major weakness in scam prevention.

“No organization sees the entire scam journey,” added Kompella. “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.”

AI-powered scams top emerging threats

Banking leaders expect the scam environment to become increasingly sophisticated over the next three years, with AI emerging as their biggest concern.

Nearly half (46%) identified AI-generated personalized scam messages and conversations as the emerging scam threat that concerns them most.

A further 28% selected the growth of criminal “scam-as-a-service” platforms, which allow criminals to access increasingly sophisticated scam infrastructure and capabilities. Another 10% cited the growth of organized mule-account networks, while 8% selected deepfake voice and video impersonation and another 8% chose attacks against biometric authentication.

Fraud and scam prevention was also the most frequently selected priority for AI or agentic decisioning, chosen by 75% of banking leaders surveyed.

Putting AI into practice remains a challenge, however. Nearly half of respondents (47%) identified data and infrastructure as a barrier to scaling AI-driven decisioning, while 43% cited legacy systems and integration. Banks across Asia Pacific are at an inflection point. As scammers attack at greater speed and lower cost, banks will need behavioral intelligence that can detect the subtle signals of customer manipulation and enable intervention before funds move.

The survey shows banks understand both the problem and the need for earlier intervention. The opportunity now is to turn that ambition into action by connecting data, modernizing infrastructure and combining AI-powered behavioral analytics, real-time customer engagement and faster cross-industry intelligence sharing to build more resilient scam defenses.

The poll was conducted in August 2026 during FICO's Banking Leaders Forum in Bali. It captured responses from 51 senior executives and C-suite leaders from leading banks across Asia Pacific.

Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker