More than half of banking leaders across Asia Pacific are not confident their institutions can spot a scam before money leaves a customer’s account, according to a new poll from FICO.
The poll, conducted in August 2026 at FICO’s Banking Leaders Forum in Bali, surveyed 51 senior executives and C-suite leaders from banks across the region. It found that 51 per cent of respondents lack confidence in their bank’s ability to detect customer manipulation or coercion before a payment goes through, with just 2 per cent describing themselves as very confident.
Banks want to act sooner, but lack the tools
The survey points to a widening gap between intent and capability. Seventy-seven per cent of respondents said banks should intervene immediately once behavioural warning signs point to significant risk, rather than waiting for a suspicious transaction to be attempted. Yet 54 per cent named better behavioural analytics and connected fraud intelligence as the top capability their institution still lacks.
“Scammers are increasingly manipulating legitimate customers into authorising payments themselves,” said Dattu Kompella, FICO’s managing director for Asia Pacific. He added that as AI makes social engineering more convincing, banks need to catch changes in customer behaviour before funds move.
Thirty-nine per cent of respondents flagged a separate problem: banks, telcos and social media platforms are too slow at sharing scam intelligence with each other, even though a single scam often crosses all three.
AI seen as both threat and priority
Nearly half of banking leaders — 46 per cent — named AI-generated, personalised scam messages as their biggest emerging concern over the next three years, ahead of scam-as-a-service platforms (28 per cent) and mule-account networks (10 per cent). Fraud and scam prevention was also the top priority banks cited for AI or agentic decisioning investment, chosen by 75 per cent of respondents.
Putting that into practice is another matter. Forty-seven per cent pointed to data and infrastructure gaps as a barrier to scaling AI-driven decisioning, and 43 per cent cited legacy systems.
“No organisation sees the entire scam journey,” Kompella said, noting that by the time signals from social media, telecoms and banking are connected, the funds involved may already be gone.
FICO’s findings arrive as regulators and banks across Southeast Asia continue to grapple with scam losses tied to social engineering, a threat that has consistently outpaced older forms of account takeover fraud in the region.
