A new BioCatch survey paints a stark picture of India’s banking fraud landscape, with 84% of banking leaders reporting rising fraud losses over the past year, up sharply from 57% in the previous survey. The findings suggest that AI-driven fraud, instant-payment scams and deepfakes are intensifying pressure on banks already grappling with faster and more sophisticated attacks.
The survey, which covered 100 fraud management, financial crime prevention and risk leaders in India as part of a wider 1,440-respondent global study across 25 countries, found that 90% of Indian banking leaders saw fraud attempts increase in the past year. That is significantly above the 81% global average and far higher than the 70% reported in India last year. India also emerged as the most concerned market in the study when it came to the accelerating speed of fraud.
AI is clearly central to the anxiety. 93% of Indian respondents said AI has increased the sophistication of fraud and scam schemes, while 83% believe AI agents could become the industry’s next major exploitable vulnerability over the next year. The same survey found that 90% of Indian leaders believe it will become very difficult to distinguish legitimate AI-assisted actions from manipulated or malicious activity.
UPI and Deepfakes Add Pressure
Instant payment platforms are emerging as a major attack surface. Two-thirds of Indian banking leaders said scam attempts via instant-payment rails are the biggest driver of fraud in the country, a finding that aligns with India’s rapid UPI adoption and the new fraud opportunities that come with it. At the same time, 64% of respondents said they had seen scammers use deepfakes over the past year to strengthen impersonation and social-engineering attacks.
The financial impact is already material. Nearly half of Indian institutions surveyed said they lose more than $10 million to fraud each year, while 58% said customers lose more than $5 million annually to authorised fraud and scams. That makes fraud not just a security issue, but a direct customer-retention and trust challenge for banks.
Banks Want Shared Intelligence
The study also shows that Indian banks increasingly see collaboration as part of the answer. 94% of respondents said interbank intelligence sharing could significantly improve fraud prevention, while 93% said real-time intelligence about the receiving account in a transaction would help them stop scams more effectively. That points to a broader industry need for coordinated data sharing, especially as AI compresses the time window for intervention.
BioCatch CEO Gadi Mazor said financial institutions must move beyond static identity checks and toward a deeper understanding of behaviour, intent and trust as digital interactions become more automated and agent-driven. For Indian banks, the report suggests that fraud defences must now evolve as quickly as the threats themselves.
