Canadians have lost over $500 million to scams from 2014 to 2018 and are more concerned with fraud and identity theft today than they were five years ago. This widespread concern is not unwarranted. From a rise in account takeover to the threat of authorized push payment fraud (APP), the fraud landscape is quickly evolving. In fact, the uphill battle is not expected to plateau anytime soon. Financial institutions are peering forward and bracing for a new wave of attacks led by an era of digital transformation and on-demand servicing.

Bad actors are eager to exploit the weaknesses of defense mechanisms behind these newly developed digital capabilities. Simultaneously, payments modernization has swept through the global landscape with ‘Faster Payments’ in the UK, ‘Instant Payments’ in Europe, and the ‘New Payments Platform (NPP)’ in Australia. A shift to faster payments is well underway in the U.S., and Canada’s real-time payment system, the ‘Real-Time Rail,’ is expected to follow in 2020. With new changes come new vulnerabilities and increasing threats. When the rollout of Faster Payments took place in the UK, online banking fraud alone went up a reported 264 percent within the first two years.