NEW YORK--As scams grow faster and more convincing, financial institutions are being pushed to rethink fraud prevention around a harder truth: stopping modern fraud now means defending against both technology-driven attacks and human manipulation, according to PYMNTS.
In an interview with PYMNTS, Aman Cheema, vice president and head of global professional services for risk and security intelligence solutions at Visa, said artificial intelligence has become essential in fraud defense—but no longer provides a competitive edge by itself because criminals are using many of the same tools. Instead, he argued institutions need to combine AI with human judgment and broader intelligence-sharing across the payments ecosystem.
PYMNTS reported Cheema said scams increasingly move over faster payment rails, allowing fraudsters to push authorized transactions out the door almost instantly and making recovery difficult. That challenge is compounded by the fact many scams now rely less on stolen credentials and more on social engineering, with criminals using generative AI to gather personal details, mimic trusted contacts and persuade consumers to approve transactions that may appear legitimate to traditional monitoring systems.
To counter that, PYMNTS said Visa is emphasizing behavioral analytics, including technology from Featurespace, to model how consumers normally transact and flag activity that falls outside those patterns. Cheema said the goal is not simply to collect more data, but to separate meaningful signals from noise by looking at transaction behavior over time and sharing intelligence among issuers, merchants and payment providers.
Cheema told PYMNTS the real differentiator is still human expertise—analysts who can spot emerging fraud patterns across regions, merchant categories or customer types before automated systems fully connect the dots. That, he said, points to a new fraud-fighting model built around “humans, applications and data,” with AI serving as an accelerator rather than a standalone solution.