FICO Research: AI Arms Race Drives 25% Surge in EMEA Fraud Attempts

Financial institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are facing a surge in sophisticated, AI-enabled fraud, with 52% of leaders identifying rising complexity as their primary hurdle. For fintech professionals, this shift signals a move away from isolated point solutions toward enterprise-wide orchestration as firms struggle to balance aggressive fraud prevention with high false-positive rates.

What was announced

FICO has released new research detailing the operational and technological pressures facing 202 senior fraud, risk, and technology professionals at retail banks, neobanks, and fintechs across the EMEA region. The data reveals a significant escalation in the threat landscape, with 36% of institutions reporting that fraud attempts have risen by more than 25% over the last 24 months. This volume is matched by financial impact, as 28% of respondents noted that financial losses from fraud grew by more than 25% in the same period.

The research highlights a growing disparity between global and regional challenges. While 40% of global firms struggle with fraud complexity, that figure rises to 52% in EMEA. Respondents rated AI-enhanced fraud as the most significant threat, scoring it 4.42 out of 5, followed by social engineering scams at 4.36. Other high-priority concerns include synthetic identities (4.02) and deepfake-enabled fraud (3.96), all of which outpaced global concern levels. Operationally, 48% of EMEA respondents identified effective AI integration as a top challenge, reflecting the difficulty of embedding new technologies into existing frameworks.

To combat these threats, 86% of EMEA institutions now view a unified, enterprise-wide fraud strategy as essential. Currently, 46% of these organizations rely on third-party vendor models to drive fraud decisions, significantly higher than the 24% who rely on in-house models. The FICO Enterprise Fraud Solution, powered by the FICO Platform, is positioned to address these needs through a composable, API-first architecture that utilizes AI and ML models trained on data from a consortium of over 10,000 financial institutions.

"Fraud in EMEA is not accelerating out of control, but it is becoming far more sophisticated, and that shift matters just as much. Fraudsters now have access to the same generative and agentic AI tools that banks are deploying to stop them, and they are using them to scale social engineering, synthetic identities and deepfake-enabled attacks. The institutions pulling ahead are the ones connecting their fraud functions across the enterprise and orchestrating every intelligence source they have, rather than adding point solutions one at a time."

Adam Davies, vice president, Product Management at FICO.

The companies involved

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a prominent global analytics software firm headquartered in the United States. The company is widely recognized for its credit scoring models, but it maintains a significant footprint in the enterprise fraud and risk management sectors. Its technology is used by a vast network of financial institutions to automate and improve decision-making processes. FICO’s market position is bolstered by its proprietary consortium data, which aggregates tagged transaction information from more than 10,000 financial institutions to train its machine learning models.

The company’s current strategy emphasizes its "FICO Platform," a cloud-based environment designed to break down data silos within large organizations. By providing a unified space for data science and operational decisioning, FICO competes with both legacy financial technology providers and specialized cybersecurity firms. In the EMEA region, FICO acts as a critical infrastructure partner for both traditional retail banks and the emerging neobank sector, providing the analytical "connective tissue" required to manage risk across diverse product portfolios and geographies.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has extensively covered FICO’s role in the evolving European fraud landscape. In September 2026, the FICO European Fraud Map: UK Resilience Shines as Continental Card Fraud Hits €1.69 Billion highlighted the geographical variations in card fraud losses across the continent. Prior to this, in July 2026, the company expanded its technical offerings as FICO Launches New DataOps Capabilities to Accelerate Enterprise AI Adoption and Decision Intelligence, aiming to streamline how banks deploy AI models. In late 2025, FF News reported on FICO’s distribution strategy when FICO Adds Powerful Credit Optimization Tools to AWS Marketplace. Additionally, the real-world application of these tools was seen when PostFinance Strengthens Fraud Protection and Customer Communications with FICO Technology, demonstrating the integration of fraud prevention with customer experience.

What this means

The industry is entering a period where the democratization of AI tools has leveled the playing field between attackers and defenders. When fraudsters utilize the same agentic AI capabilities as the banks, the competitive advantage shifts from who has the best detection model to who can orchestrate data most efficiently across the entire enterprise. The high false-positive rates reported in EMEA—exceeding 15% for half of the institutions—suggest that current "point solution" approaches are reaching their limit, creating unsustainable friction for legitimate customers. The market is now under intense pressure to move AI from experimental pilots into disciplined, production-scale frameworks that can handle the nuance of deepfakes and synthetic identities in real time.