Real-Time Payments, AI Driving New Fraud Risks For Financial Institutions, Nuvei Executive Warns
By CU Today Staff —
LONDON—The rapid rise of real-time payments is fundamentally reshaping fraud risk for financial institutions and merchants, compressing the time available to detect suspicious transactions just as artificial intelligence is making fraud faster, more scalable and harder to identify, according to a new analysis from Noam Grinberg, chief risk officer for global enterprise at Nuvei.
Writing in a report carried by GlobalData, Grinberg said the explosive growth of instant payment systems such as FedNow in the U.S., SEPA Instant in Europe and Brazil’s Pix network is eliminating the traditional time buffers that fraud-prevention systems once depended on. Global real-time payment volumes grew more than 50% year-over-year in 2025 and are projected to surpass $600 billion by 2035, according to the report.
Grinberg said fraud prevention historically relied on delays built into payment settlement systems, allowing transactions to be reviewed, escalated or reversed before funds moved permanently. But as payments increasingly settle in seconds, fraud decisions must now occur “within the transaction itself,” leaving traditional rules-based systems struggling to keep pace.
At the same time, AI is dramatically changing the nature of fraud by reducing the cost of creating synthetic identities, scaling social-engineering attacks and coordinating fraudulent activity across multiple accounts and markets in real time. Grinberg argued that the key competitive advantage for payments providers is increasingly tied to infrastructure capable of continuously learning from transaction-level data and updating fraud models instantly without increasing customer friction or false declines.
The report said fragmented payment architectures leave institutions making fraud decisions with incomplete information, while unified payment platforms processing large transaction volumes gain structural advantages by learning from broader datasets across markets and payment methods. Grinberg concluded that as instant payments become the global standard, the issue for FIs and payment providers is no longer simply how to manage fraud, but whether their systems are capable of operating at the speed the market now demands.
Originally reported by CU Today.