Payment fraud, or the deliberate misuse of payment instruments to steal or unlawfully manipulate funds, has moved from an episodic operational risk to structural supervisory concern. One embedded within Europe’s rapidly expanding digital payments ecosystem.

The EBA Consumer Trends Report 2024/2025 [1] categorised payment fraud explicitly as a “Topical Issue”, signalling its prioritisation within supervisory agendas across the EU.

It encompasses typologies such as:

• Unauthorised Transactions — payments executed without the payer’s consent.

• Authorised Push Payment (APP) Fraud — payments the victim is deceived into authorising.

• Account Takeover — unauthorised control of bank accounts gained through information theft.

The joint ECB/EBA 2025 Report on Payment Fraud [2] comes as the logical continuation to the EBA’s initial analysis. Where the Consumer Trends Report identified risk from a consumer and supervisory perspective, the joint report quantifies it, providing EU-wide fraud data, trend analysis, and structural insights into how fraud is evolving across the payments landscape. The data sets the stage for a deeper strategic shift in 2026.

Strong Customer Authentication Reduces Fraud, But Risk Concentrates Within It

The report confirms that strong customer authentication (SCA) lowers fraud rates overall, particularly for card payments. However, it also observes that “higher fraud rates were observed for SCA-authenticated transactions, likely reflecting the fact that SCA is typically applied to higher-risk or higher-value payments.” This indicates a more nuanced reality: while SCA reduces baseline fraud exposure, it is disproportionately triggered in transactions already assessed as higher risk, meaning fraud risk is increasingly concentrated within authenticated flows.

Institutions cannot assume that SCA-authenticated transactions are inherently low risk, focus should be placed on:

• Treating authenticated transactions as risk-weighted, not risk-free.

• Strengthening monitoring within SCA-triggered flows.

• Maintaining investigative scrutiny for higher-value authenticated payments.

SCA has compressed broad fraud exposure. The next challenge is managing the residual, higher-risk fraud that remains concentrated within authenticated transactions.

Fraud Losses Are Rising Despite Rates Remaining Low

While fraud rates as a percentage of total transactions remain comparatively low, the total value of fraud is increasing year-on-year. The report states: “The total value of fraudulent payment transactions reported by the industry across the European Economic Area (EEA) amounted to EUR 4.2 billion in 2024. This represents a year-on-year increase of […] 17 % from 2023 to 2024, despite stable fraud rates.” This indicates that transaction growth across the EU payments ecosystem is amplifying aggregate losses, even where proportional fraud rates appear stable. The growing scale of payments amplifies impact.

Fraud risk is compounding through ecosystem growth and resilience must scale proportionately. Static investigation capacity: manual reviews, fragmented workflows, and inconsistent case handling will increasingly lag behind digital transaction expansion. 

Manipulation of the Payer Is Central to Credit Transfer Fraud Losses

Manipulation-based fraud now represents the dominant driver of credit transfer losses. The report states that “manipulation of the payer accounted for more than half of the total value of fraudulent credit transfers,” confirming that victims are increasingly authorising payments themselves rather than fraud occurring solely through unauthorised access. Also noted is that specific individuals are groomed through “tailor-made attacks”. 

Criminals increasingly exploit the specific behavioural vulnerabilities associated with credit transfers, likely associated with the contextual urgency and obligation associated with the payment type.

Credit transfers carry behavioural weight. Institutions must treat social engineering as a structural risk category, particularly for credit transfers. This requires:

• Context-aware friction for new beneficiaries, urgent references, and first-time high-value transfers.

• Targeted monitoring of invoice-driven and impersonation-linked payment patterns.

• Frameworks that explicitly assess inducement and deception indicators.

• Clear audit trails demonstrating how behavioural risk was evaluated.

Cross-Border Transactions Present Disproportionate Risk

The report highlights significant disparities in fraud rates between domestic and extra-EEA transactions, noting that “Fraud rates for card payments were about seventeen times higher when the counterpart was outside the EEA, where SCA may not be required, compared to domestic transactions.” This evidences the exploitation of regulatory asymmetries, particularly where authentication standards differ across jurisdictions.

Criminal networks exploit regulatory gaps, where authentication and supervisory standards diverge, fraud migrates. Fragmentation creates exposure; cross-border visibility and coordination are strategic requirements.

Institutions will need:

• Enhanced data-sharing capabilities.

• Consistent investigative logic across jurisdictions.

• Harmonised risk scoring for cross-border transactions.

Remote Channels Dominate Fraud Incidence

The report establishes digital channels as the primary exposure surface within the EU payments ecosystem, stating that “Fraud involving card payments, credit transfers and e-money transactions predominantly occurred in remote transactions.” As digital payments accelerate, the convenience they offer expands the attack surface, increasing exposure to fraud across remote channels. 

Fraud controls must be digital-native and real-time. Post-event review, in isolation, will not contain losses in high-volume environments. Prevention, detection, and investigation must operate at digital speed.

From Detection to Investigation: The Emerging Structural Shift

Across the five insights, the structural implication is clear: the constraint in 2026 will not be alert generation. It will be the capacity to investigate high-risk, high-value, behaviourally complex, and cross-border cases consistently and defensibly at scale. 

As fraud grows in complexity and supervisory scrutiny intensifies, institutions will be judged not only on detection performance, but on the quality and consistency of their investigative outcomes. 2026 will reward institutions that build structural fraud resilience.