Financial institutions are spending more on fraud than ever. Most of them say the threat is still moving faster than they can. The problem isn’t the size of the budget. It’s the speed of the response.

Fraud teams just put a number on what many of them have felt for years.

ProSight Financial Association’s 2026 State of Fraud Prevention Survey, which drew 125 banking professionals from institutions across North America this summer, found that 85% of respondents believe the threat environment is changing faster than their institutions can respond. About one in five (21%) said it is changing much faster.

That’s not for lack of spending. More than half of respondents (53%) increased fraud prevention budgets by at least 5% in the most recent fiscal year, ProSight said in its Oct. 1 announcement. The report’s own conclusion is blunt: institutions are spending more than ever, and they still struggle to put prevention into practice quickly enough.

The constraint isn’t money

When ProSight asked what actually limits anti-fraud programs, budget wasn’t at the top of the list. Alert overload (64%) and data quality (62%) were cited more often than budget constraints (51%), according to the release. In the full report, talent and staffing limitations land right alongside alert overload as a top constraint.

Read that together and the picture is clear. Institutions are generating more alerts than their people can work. And when ProSight asked where institutions plan to invest over the next three years, internal staffing ranked last of eight areas, at 8%. The answer isn’t going to be hiring a bigger team to read a longer queue.

The pressure is also not spread evenly. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said fraud is growing. Among institutions under $10 billion in assets, 32% reported a substantial increase, the report found. That is the community bank and credit union tier, where fraud teams are often a handful of people.

The attacks are moving to where the clock matters most

Check fraud remains the largest source of loss exposure (58%) and the fastest-growing fraud type (46%). But authorized push payment scams rank second for fastest growth, at 40%, and 20% of respondents named real-time rails such as RTP, Zelle and FedNow as a major loss exposure.

Jason Bartolacci, director of the ProSight Fraud Alert Network, described how criminals have shifted: “Banking institutions have spent years hardening their digital channels, and criminals have adjusted. They are going after the customer directly through bank and law enforcement impersonation scams.” He added: “When a customer authorizes the payment themselves, a detection model has far less to work with.”

Regulators see the same trend. In its spring Semiannual Risk Perspective, the OCC said on May 7 that “banks continue to face challenges from both the elevated levels and rising sophistication of fraud and scams,” and that “cybercriminal groups targeting the financial sector are increasingly sophisticated.”

Institutions know where this is headed. In the report, 41% named expanding real-time transaction monitoring as their top fraud-prevention priority over the next 12 to 24 months, and 43% expect to increase investment in real-time payment controls.

Real-time detection isn’t the same as real-time protection

Here is the trap. Real-time monitoring that ends in an alert is still a queue. If the alert lands at 9 p.m. on a Friday and a fraud analyst sees it Monday morning, the system detected the fraud in real time and the institution responded in days.

That’s the gap the 85% are describing. Not a failure to see fraud, but a failure to act on it at the speed money now moves. Adding budget to that model mostly buys more alerts. More alerts are exactly what institutions say is already overwhelming them.

The old model: Detect → Alert → Wait for a human.

The model this moment demands: Detect → Assess → Act.

Where RembrandtAi® fits

RembrandtAi® was built to close the distance between seeing fraud and stopping it. It ingests events across every channel (card, ACH, remote deposit, online banking, ATM), scores each one in real time with multi-stage AI, including neural networks, statistical analysis and machine learning, and checks that risk score against thresholds your institution sets.

When a transaction crosses the line, RembrandtAi® acts directly in your banking core. Member alerts, card restrictions, transaction blocks, account freezes and access suspension fire automatically, 24/7/365, with no human in the loop required. The countermeasure doesn’t wait for someone to open a queue.

That changes what your team spends its time on. Instead of triaging an endless stream of alerts, your people set the thresholds, work the exceptions and own the member conversation. The volume problem stays with the machine. The judgment stays with your staff.

The approach has a track record. Launch Credit Union adopted RembrandtAi® at the end of 2020. Its CFO says it saw a 97% reduction in fraudulent transactions, and it saved $1.8 million in 2021, American Banker reported. As CFO Kevin LeBeau put it: “If you’re uploading three hours later, that money is already gone.”

The takeaway

The industry has spent its way to better detection. ProSight’s survey shows that detection alone hasn’t closed the gap: most institutions still say fraud moves faster than they do, and their biggest constraints are alerts and people, not dollars.

The next dollar shouldn’t buy another alert. It should buy a response that happens at the moment of risk.

AI must move at the speed of payments.

See how RembrandtAi® acts in real time, in your core. Request a demo.

Sources

1. Celina Rogers, Sam Knox and Frank Devlin (ProSight Financial Association), “The 2026 ProSight State of Fraud Prevention Survey: Escalating Threats and Evolving Defenses,” ProSight Financial Association, Sept. 30, 2026. https://www.prosightfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/The-2026-ProSight-State-of-Fraud-Prevention-Survey-092926.pdf
2. ProSight Financial Association, “2026 ProSight State of Fraud Prevention: Financial Institutions Say Technology Alone Won’t Solve the Fraud Problem,” Business Wire, Oct. 1, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261001405381/en/
3. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, “OCC’s Semiannual Risk Perspective Highlights Key Risks in Federal Banking System,” OCC News Release 2026-35, May 7, 2026. https://occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ-2026-35.html
4. Carter Pape, “Florida credit union overhauls its fraud prevention with big assist from AI,” American Banker, May 6, 2022. https://www.americanbanker.com/news/ai-revolutionized-how-this-credit-union-prevents-fraud