Financial Firms Face More AI-Assisted Fraud Activity – and Appear Better Prepared, Regula Study Finds

RESTON, Va., Aug. 04, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Regula, a global developer of identity verification solutions, has introduced the AI Identity Readiness Scorecard, a new analytical framework that evaluates how prepared different industries are for the growing role of AI in identity verification. The analysis shows that financial organizations face more AI-assisted identity activity than any other sector surveyed – yet are also adapting faster than the rest of the market.

Rather than measuring fraud volume alone, the AI Identity Readiness Scorecard looks at organizational readiness through four comparable dimensions:

• AI exposure,
• visibility into AI-assisted interactions,
• identity verification capability,
• audit evidence.

Together, these indicators reveal not only where AI is appearing first, but also which industries are adapting faster.

The initial edition of the AI Identity Readiness Scorecard focuses on Financial Services – an industry that increasingly serves as an early indicator of how AI is reshaping identity fraud. According to Regula's analysis, financial organizations report both the highest exposure to AI-assisted identity activity and the strongest capabilities to detect, assess, and document it.

How Financial Services compares with the rest of the surveyed industries across the four dimensions of the AI Identity Readiness Scorecard

Why Financial Services offers an early view of what comes next

Historically, fraud innovations tend to emerge where financial incentives are greatest. AI-assisted identity attacks appear to be following the same pattern.

Financial institutions manage high-value identity events every day – from onboarding and lending to account recovery and beneficiary changes. It makes them an attractive environment for attackers experimenting with AI, automation, synthetic identities, and deepfakes.

The findings suggest that what appears in financial services today is likely to become a broader challenge for other industries tomorrow.

Financial Services is more exposed. But also more ready

One of the report's most notable findings is that financial organizations outperform other industries across every dimension of the Scorecard – not despite experiencing more AI-assisted activity, but while experiencing more of it.

Compared with the survey-wide benchmark, Financial Services reports:

• Greater AI exposure, reflecting more frequent AI-assisted and automated identity activity across onboarding, lending, account recovery, and other high-value customer journeys.
• Clearer visibility into AI-assisted interactions, with organizations more likely to distinguish legitimate software assistance from suspicious automation and classify AI participation with confidence.
• Stronger identity verification capabilities, including more mature liveness detection, human presence verification, synthetic content detection, and the ability to reconstruct identity decisions.
• Better audit evidence supporting identity decisions, retaining richer records of identity checks, reviewer actions, and decision rationale for regulatory reviews and investigations.
  
  

Together, these findings suggest that continuous exposure to AI-driven identity risks may be accelerating organizational maturity.

“Financial organizations are not ahead because they face fewer AI-related identity threats. Quite the opposite: they encounter them more often. Their advantage is that constant pressure has forced them to develop better visibility, stronger identity controls, and more complete decision evidence. Financial Services is simply the first sector to adapt to an identity landscape where distinguishing between human and machine participation is becoming a daily challenge,” says Henry Patishman, Executive Vice President of Identity Verification Solutions at Regula.

Read the full Financial Services AI Identity Readiness Scorecard on the Regula Blog.

About Regula

Regula is a global developer of identity verification (IDV) solutions and forensic devices, trusted by over 2,000 organizations across regulated industries worldwide. Regula IDV solutions deliver end-to-end document verification, biometric authentication, and identity lifecycle management. They enable organizations to prevent fraud by ensuring the integrity of every signal behind each decision. Built on 34 years of document forensics expertise, fully proprietary technology, and an in-house forensic laboratory, Regula maintains the world’s largest template library of 16,000+ ID templates from 254 countries and territories. The company’s technologies are deployed at 80+ border control authorities worldwide. Recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification.

Learn more at www.regulaforensics.com.

Contact:
Kristina – ks@regula.us

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