Fraud and Cyber Are Merging, but Confidence Is Another Story

The Fraud Readiness Benchmark 2026 revealed that 81% of fraud management professionals also have responsibilities in cybersecurity, and vice versa. As the traditional divide between fraud and cyber continues to disappear, a different gap is emerging: confidence.

Saying that modern fraud has become harder to untangle is hardly news to anyone working in banking. What's more interesting is how that reality is reshaping fraud teams themselves. The traditional boundary between fraud and cybersecurity is rapidly disappearing, with 8 in 10 fraud management professionals now carrying responsibilities in both areas.

In many ways, this was inevitable. Many of the methods used by fraudsters, from phishing and malware to credential theft, are classic cyberattacks deployed in service of financial crime. Likewise, many of the incidents cybersecurity teams investigate ultimately have a fraud objective. And when criminals target a bank, they rarely think in terms of fraud and cyber. They combine whatever techniques will get them to the same destination: access, control, and ultimately money.

By merging or closely aligning cyber and fraud, banks ensure that less falls through the cracks. A suspicious pattern detected by the cyber team can immediately inform fraud monitoring, while insights from fraud investigations can strengthen cybersecurity defenses. When the cyber team takes down a phishing site, a classic cyber task, fraud analysts can proactively warn the customers it targeted. What once required coordination between separate teams becomes part of the same response.

A Bigger Mission Requires Bigger Teams

As fraud prevention has become more multidisciplinary, teams have to bring in a broader mix of expertise. Today's fraud function increasingly sits at the intersection of fraud, cybersecurity, data analysis, compliance, and customer protection, making team growth a natural response to a growing scope of responsibility.

The numbers reflect that change. About 87% of financial institutions now report having more than 10 full-time staff dedicated to fraud management.

While the days of small fraud teams might be over, headcount cannot scale forever. Adding people is expensive, and larger teams bring their own coordination challenges. That is fueling interest in technologies such as AI and behavioral intelligence, which can help institutions absorb rising case volumes without having to expand fraud teams at the same rate.

Prepared for AI? It Depends Who You Ask

Fraud teams may be getting larger, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they feel more prepared. As institutions increasingly rely on AI to strengthen fraud prevention, the question is no longer just whether they have enough people, but whether they have the expertise they need.

The benchmark data suggests the answer may depend on who you ask.

When asked, “Does your institution have the necessary expertise to deploy and manage an AI-enabled fraud prevention solution?”, around 80% of managers answered confidently. Among executives, that figure falls to roughly 74%. Among team-level respondents, it drops to just 60%.

This indicates that while banks have worked hard to break down silos between fraud and cybersecurity, a different gap has emerged. Those closest to day-to-day fraud operations are significantly less likely to believe the necessary capabilities are in place than those making decisions further up the chain.

Readiness Looks Different from the Front Line

The gap doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of expertise, but rather how readiness is experienced at different levels of the organization. Senior leaders tend to see the bigger picture: investments in technology, specialist resources, external partnerships... On the other hand, team-level staff experience readiness much more directly through the tools they use, the alerts they investigate, and the challenges they face every day.

Those are the people dealing directly with ever-evolving attack techniques. Consequently, they are also the first to encounter the friction and complexity that are very real, but never make it into strategy presentations.

Their confidence—or lack of it—is often the clearest indicator of whether an institution can turn strategy into execution.

Equipping Teams for a Converged Fraud Environment

If frontline teams are less confident than their managers, the challenge is getting the right knowledge, tools, and support to the people who need them, when they need them: during investigations, alert reviews, customer interactions, escalations, and live fraud decisions.

That means giving teams a shared understanding of risk, technology that makes their jobs easier, not harder, and access to capabilities that can be applied consistently across the organization.

1. Converged Teams Need a Shared View of Risk

As fraud and cyber converge, institutions need a shared understanding of risk. Separate systems and datasets made more sense when fraud and cybersecurity operated independently. Today, attacks increasingly cross that line, and those divisions can get in the way.

Threats that span fraud and cyber require teams to work from the same information. When investigators, analysts, and security specialists can see the same signals and context, decisions become faster and more consistent. ThreatMark supports this approach through a unified platform that combines behavioral, device, transaction, and threat intelligence, providing real-time visibility across users, devices, sessions, and transactions.

2. Technology Should Lower the Expertise Burden

As fraud prevention becomes more sophisticated (with 99% of institutions either using or planning to implement behavioral intelligence) and demands on already stretched teams mount, technology should help, not add more complexity. In other words, the goal is not to turn every investigator into a machine learning expert; it is to give them better tools to investigate suspicious activity and stop fraud.

ThreatMark follows that principle by making behavioral intelligence accessible without requiring extensive in-house expertise. Combining behavioral insights with pre-trained machine learning models and preconfigured decision logic, it helps fraud teams focus on investigations and decision-making while much of the analytical complexity happens behind the scenes.

3. Expertise Must Evolve with the Threats

One reason frontline teams may feel less confident than senior leaders is that they experience the pace of change firsthand. New scam tactics, social engineering techniques, cyber threats, and attack methods emerge constantly, creating pressure to keep processes and detection capabilities up to date.

Keeping up with that pace is a challenge for any institution. The question is no longer “Do we have the expertise?” but “Do we have the expertise for what's coming next?” ThreatMark focuses exclusively on digital banking fraud—meaning dedicated specialists and threat analysts constantly track how attacks are changing. What they learn feeds directly back into the platform, so fraud teams can respond to emerging threat patterns without having to track and analyze every new threat themselves.

Bringing Expertise to the Front Line

Fraud and cyber convergence isn’t really a story about team structures. It comes down to how well expertise travels through an organization. Frontline teams cannot be expected to master every new threat or understand all the complexity behind the technology they use. They should not have to. What matters is whether they have the right expertise at their fingertips to make the right call when fraud is happening.

Give your fraud team the expertise and technology to keep pace. Book a demo.