Worldline joins the RiskX event: Lessons for renewed payments security

Here is our summary of key lessons to take away from the RiskX conference, that we want to share with all our partners, customers and participants in the financial ecosystem.

AI Disruptions: A Matter of Transnational Strategy

As AI-related services and industries are becoming more widespread, governments worldwide are redrawing their digital strategies in a race to remain relevant and competitive. The United States and China are the top players for now, with Europe trailing behind. As a follower, Europe needs to react and ramp up its capabilities before the gap becomes even larger.

Hardware and infrastructure are the top concerns for increasing AI capabilities, with a special nod to semiconductors, which were already facing a crisis even before the AI FOMO-driven gold rush. Adding the still high energy demands of AI and the shortage of sufficient talent for further AI development and it becomes very clear that we’re all impacted by a tight race for AI disruption. How much countries invest in this race and what they choose to prioritize and specialize in will likely lead not only to some services being facilitated, but potentially to a new regulation landscape as well, beyond the EU AI Act.

This all has a very direct impact on the financial system for all ecosystem players involved, from banks and financial institutions to merchants and consumers. Here’s how and why.

New AI-Empowered Fraud Trends

AI acceleration has a direct impact on the security landscape for the financial world. The main concern is that scams are undergoing a resurgence through AI, with deepfakes, malicious authentication attempts and automatic attacks now being done increasingly through AI agents. This means that potential scammers can mount up even more attacks with less effort and with increasing sophistication.

Event examples showed just how diverse these risks are: NFC relay attacks that allow fraudsters to exploit Apple Pay tokens, fake hospital bills issued to patients before the real invoice arrives, and even Olympic ticket scams where empty envelopes were sent to victims along with fake customer service numbers to delay discovery. RiskX attendees agreed on a final estimation for the fraud crime toll of last year: it’s estimated that fraud has cost the world around $9 trillion at the end of 2024. With the rise of AI-powered fraud tools, this number is expected to grow much higher.

The event also illustrated how fraudsters are scaling up their operations: over 600 scam websites pushed in a single ad campaign, boosted by bots generating fake engagement and positive reviews.

Financial institutions and banks need to be ready to tackle fraud in this new AI-powered threat environment, by adapting their security solutions to make them AI-fluent as well, just as we have also incorporated AI capabilities and insights into our Digital Security Suite, Trusted Authentication and Fraud Management Suite (FRAMS) solutions.

New Financial Horizons: Agentic E-commerce

We’re not there yet, but we will be soon: the tech world is converging upon creating smart AI agents that can perform the tedious aspects of shopping on behalf of a consumer who empowers them. Once consumers will give their AI agents access to a payment method they own, a new attack surface will be created for would-be criminals.

Discussions at the event showed how agentic commerce could work in practice, with AI agents supported by toolkits and sign-up flows, including demos where transactions were either blocked if risky or tested to confirm that goods were actually delivered.

Our efforts at Worldline, and the efforts of other industry representatives we connected with at RiskX, are now focused towards ensuring state of the art security for agentic e-commerce. That way, once the AI shopping agents start becoming the new normal, we can continue to empower our banking customers with the same level of multi-rail fraud protection that they are used to receiving from us.

Towards a New Era of Digital Trust

The principles of ‘security by design’ and ‘privacy by design’ (sometimes at odds with each other for service providers) were already set as goals for the tech industry for the past few years. But now with the new challenges rising, we all need to strive to do better in really implementing them as a starting point for product design and not as product patches and afterthoughts.

Speakers underlined that no single sector (public, private or academic) can tackle these threats alone. Collaborative platforms, partnerships and shared intelligence were emphasized as essential to addressing them. Sessions highlighted how fraud can be monitored across the entire customer journey and how AI can help detect stolen data being traded online.

Building on this idea of collaboration, one practical approach is to unify all your security features into a full-rail full-chain protection for your entire payment ecosystem, the way we’re doing it here at Worldline. Other ways might involve, for some, reworking their entire products from scratch to ensure adequate security.

Data from RiskX also highlighted that the most targeted industries in Europe are technology, public sector, financial services, and industrial fields, together accounting for more than half of all cyberattacks. Moreover, ransomware victims were shown to have far weaker cyber hygiene, with up to 15 times more unresolved vulnerabilities than the general population.

Keeping an eye out for future developments in the adjacent fields of AI innovation and on new legislation that will come up, fraud fighting is poised to become interesting.

Do you want to talk about how you can strengthen your anti-fraud protection? Get in touch with us and let’s talk about supercharging your defenses.

The Worldline bundle of solutions that can secure your payment rails end-to-end against old and new threats from the entire cybersecurity threat landscape:

• Access Control Server
• Trusted Authentication
• Digital Security Suite
• Fraud Management Suite (FRAMS)

To learn more about our solutions, please get in touch.