NEW ORLEANS—If ever there was a case where misery loves company, it’s fraud.

“Fraud is a global issue. I think we all know it’s not just a domestic one in payments,” said Jane Larimer, Nacha President and CEO. 

“I know that if I asked payments professionals from around the globe what the top three challenges are that they’re dealing with, fraud is going to be in that top three every time,” said Larimer. “Fraud attacks are getting more frequent and way more sophisticated.”

To discover what’s being done in other parts of the world, Larimer brought together payments association leaders from Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom for the April 28 panel “Industry Focus: Fighting Fraud Across the Globe: What Can the U.S. Learn from Other Geos?” at Smarter Faster Payments 2025.

“It is a fast-accelerating issue across Canada, and a major issue not just for the banks but for Canadians themselves,” said Kristina Logue, Chief Financial Officer, Payments Canada. She said scams are “highly under-reported” despite a 40% increase in reporting over the past five years. And the numbers are staggering.

“The amount reported lost to scams in Canada is just over $500 million ($362 million U.S.), and that’s just what’s been reported. It’s estimated to be at $11 billion ($7.9 billion U.S.),” said Logue. 

“This is a problem that impacts so many different communities, so many different industries, it can’t be tackled by just the financial institutions themselves. We’ve established the Canadian Anti-Scam Alliance. This is a formal body that’s got regulators, government, law enforcement, telco, digital platforms, as well as financial institutions, around the table to talk about how to solve for this issue for Canada,” said Logue. 

Other panelists agreed that cooperation is key. 

“It can’t just be a payments people’s problem, or the bank’s problem, or the government’s problem. It has to be everyone’s problem,” said Jane-Renee Retimana, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Payments NZ. “We need to work together as an ecosystem including with telcos, social media platforms, etc., to help identity and find solutions to these issues.”

David Pitt, CEO, Pay.UK, said, “We’ve got to accept that fraud is not a competitive sport. It’s an ecosystem issue, and therefore we’ve all got to work together to reduce it.” 

Pay.UK entered into a data sharing agreement with nine top United Kingdom banks representing more than 50% of volume and undertook a pilot program. “We took 18 months of historical data. We selected three providers because we’re not fraud experts and we don’t want to be,” said Pitt. “What we saw was a 40% increase in fraud detection by using the data.”

Pitt also noted a reduction in false positives from about 10-to-1 or 12-to-1 down to 5-to-1 in the pilot. “Therefore, you focus your energy on the right places and also you see a reduction in fraud.”

With check fraud one of the fastest growing fraud types in the U.S., perhaps the answer is to just get rid of checks. It’s happened elsewhere. 

“It wasn’t a decision we could make collectively. It would have been too close to our competition act and setting a trading condition if we had all decided we were going to stop checks. It took one bank to do it, followed by a letter from the regulators saying we support the move away from checks. And that was it,” said Ghita Erling, CEO, The Payments Association of South Africa. A plan was put together giving a three-month period to handle any checks still in the system. “After that, that was it—no more checks.”

New Zealand had a similar situation which resulted in checks disappearing about five years ago, said Retimana.  

“It was one bank saying we’re not interested in doing that anymore,” said Retimana. “That was the trigger for everyone else saying no, we don’t want to do that either.”