Cyber-enabled fraud has become a significant financial threat and daily operational challenge for fraud teams. Last year, Business Email Compromise (BEC), phishing and data breaches claimed $14.3 billion, rising at a 19.6% annualized rate from 2023-2025.
Alongside these figures is a hard reality for fraud teams: more alerts, greater complexity and fewer resources to manage it all. Expert interviews in our new 2026 Global Financial Crime Report found that fraudsters’ ability to use artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology for scams has created an “epidemic” as financial institutions fight back with too little time and too many false positive alerts.
As fraud becomes faster, more automated and more interconnected, innovation is essential. Agentic AI enables financial institutions to meet this moment by dramatically reducing the volume of alerts requiring human review while providing clear, consistent and explainable documentation.
Fighting Fraud with Few Resources
Anti-financial crime teams are under unprecedented strain. The 2026 Global Financial Crime Report found that 58% of institutions lack adequate resources to combat financial crime, and false positives consume 27% of anti-financial crime teams’ time on average. Meanwhile, the number of same day ACH transfers grew 24% in just one year, reaching 403 million payments in Q1 2026 alone.
This combination places sustained pressure on fraud teams to balance effective oversight of ACH transactions with false positive reduction — while still protecting both institutions and customers from financial loss as criminals inevitably follow the money. As fraud becomes more automated and coordinated, incremental improvements to alerting models are no longer sufficient.
Why Agentic AI Is the Answer
Agentic AI represents a shift from AI as a tool to AI as a worker. Rather than simply supporting analysts, an Agentic AI Fraud Alert Analyst mirrors the investigative workflow of a human analyst — autonomously examining all relevant data tied to an alert, answering key investigative questions, and producing clear, consistent, and explainable documentation every time. This makes Agentic AI particularly well suited to high‑complexity alert types, where determining intent and authorization is time consuming and operationally burdensome.
The Global Financial Crime Report 2026 underscores why this shift matters. AI is widely viewed as the industry’s greatest opportunity in financial crime management, with nearly three‑quarters of anti‑financial crime professionals planning to increase their use of AI and Tier 1 banks expecting to boost AI spending by 20% over the next year. But not all AI delivers the same operational value.
Agentic AI directly addresses the challenges fraud teams face today by:
- Drastically reducing the number of alerts requiring human intervention
- Providing consistent, explainable documentation
- Lowering operational costs by minimizing the need for extensive human review
- Producing thorough, audit‑ready narratives for investigations
- Enabling institutions to reallocate resources and personnel to higher‑priority investigations
Together, these outcomes deliver rapid, measurable impact — allowing fraud teams to focus on their most critical work while accelerating end‑to‑end investigations.
Streamlining ACH Origination Pull Alerts
ACH origination pull risk often stems from phishing, data breaches, and BEC, where fraudsters exploit compromised access or deceptive authorization to initiate ACH debits that pull funds directly from a victim’s account. Because this activity typically occurs before the ACH file is created, these debits can closely resemble legitimate business payments — using valid SEC codes, familiar counterparties, and expected timing or amounts.
For fraud teams, this means alerts frequently require manual investigation across multiple systems to piece together authorization context, historical behavior, and external signals in order to determine whether a debit was genuinely authorized or initiated under false pretenses.
This is where Agentic AI delivers immediate value. Nasdaq Verafin’s first Agentic Fraud Alert Analyst is embedded directly into our platform and designed specifically for ACH‑related investigations involving ACH origination pulls. By autonomously analyzing alerts and generating audit‑ready narratives, it can reduce the volume of alerts requiring human review by 40% or more, while maintaining transparency and regulatory confidence.
The Power of Consortium Data
Artificial intelligence is only as effective as the data it analyzes — and in financial crime management, that increasingly means access to consortium data, not just data from within a single institution. Nasdaq Verafin’s Agentic AI Workforce, including the Agentic AI Fraud Alert Analyst, leverages a massive consortium data set including nearly 850 million counterparties and 2700 financial institutions to streamline compliance and accelerate investigations for fraud and AML. Our suite of embedded Agentic AI Workers are purpose-built to autonomously handle low-value tasks — allowing you to focus human expertise where it truly matters.
The Future of Fraud Operations Is Already Here
Fraud has become faster, more connected and more AI‑enabled. The numbers confirm what fraud leaders already know: the status quo is unsustainable. The future of fraud prevention will require resolving risk with confidence while efficiently redirecting resources against more pressing fraud priorities. Agentic AI enables that future, transforming fraud operations from reactive review to intelligent action.
For more on Agentic AI, read our Fact Sheet.
About the Author:
GREG WILLIAMSON
Head of Fraud Commercialization Strategy
Greg Williamson is Head of Fraud Commercialization Strategy at Nasdaq Verafin and a seasoned leader in financial crime prevention, with more than two decades of experience across fraud, identity and authentication. Specializing in fraud strategy and analytics, cyber fraud prevention and the development of enterprise-scale identity and authentication solutions, Greg has held senior leadership roles at PNC Bank, Prudential, JPMorgan Chase, and Mastercard. Prior to joining Nasdaq Verafin, Greg led fraud reduction initiatives at the Bank Policy Institute, collaborating with industry leaders to advance policies, operational practices, and best practices in combating financial crime. He holds both a bachelor’s degree in Economic Crime Investigation and a master’s degree in Economic Crime Management from Utica University, and has also contributed as an adjunct instructor in economic crime studies, bringing a strong academic foundation to his practical, industry-driven perspective.
