By Julio Perez-Camacho, SVP, Global Transaction Banking Operations, Scotiabank
Real-time payments are rapidly becoming the global standard. According to ACI Worldwide, global real-time payment volumes are expected to more than double by 2028 as businesses and consumers increasingly expect immediate movement of funds and greater visibility into their cash positions.¹ At the same time, the G20's roadmap for enhancing cross-border payments continues to drive industry efforts to improve speed, transparency and accessibility across global payment networks.²
But another trend is accelerating just as quickly.
Cybercriminals are becoming faster, more sophisticated and increasingly enabled by artificial intelligence. IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report continues to rank financial services among the industries facing the highest breach costs, while the World Economic Forum has identified AI-enabled cybercrime as one of the fastest-growing risks confronting organizations today.³⁴
These parallel trends raise an important question for the payments industry: Can payments become faster without becoming riskier?
At Scotiabank, we're hearing this question more frequently in conversations with clients. Businesses want the speed and efficiency that modern payment systems provide, but they also expect every transaction to be secure. This gives the industry an opportunity to rethink how security is built into modern payment ecosystems, making payments both faster and more resilient.
Faster Payments Require a Different Approach to Risk
For years, payment controls benefited from time. Financial institutions had hours, and sometimes days, to investigate suspicious activity before funds settled. But as payment windows shrink from days to minutes, and increasingly to seconds, that operating model no longer reflects how money moves around the world.
Businesses are also relying more heavily on faster payments to improve liquidity management and support increasingly complex cross-border operations. The industry's challenge today is ensuring that risk assessments can keep pace.
Rather than introducing friction across every transaction, financial institutions are increasingly focused on identifying the relatively small number of payments that require additional scrutiny while allowing legitimate payments to move seamlessly.
Strong reconciliation is part of that equation: the sooner unusual activity is identified, the greater the opportunity to respond. As payment speeds increase, detection and response capabilities must evolve at the same pace.
Building Trust Without Creating Friction
As payment ecosystems become more interconnected, trust is becoming foundational infrastructure. Traditional security models often relied on static rules or one-time authentication. Today's environment requires a more dynamic understanding of identity and risk.
Clients also vary in how sophisticated their fraud and cyber controls are. Strong education, reconciliation and escalation processes can help organizations better understand how fraud occurs, identify suspicious activity more quickly and know who to contact when something goes wrong. Financial institutions can also look across customer behavior, transaction history and multiple payment rails to build a clearer picture of expected activity and identify unusual patterns sooner. By applying stronger controls only to higher-risk transactions, financial institutions can strengthen security while preserving a seamless payment experience.
Done well, this creates a better experience for clients. Legitimate payments continue with minimal interruption while higher-risk activity receives additional verification before funds are released.
Security becomes more intelligent, not simply more restrictive.
AI Is Changing Both the Threat and the Response
Artificial intelligence is reshaping payments from both sides.
Cybercriminals are using AI to automate attacks, personalize fraud schemes and scale malicious activity faster than ever before.
Financial institutions, however, are using many of the same technologies to strengthen payment security.
Machine learning can identify patterns that traditional rules may overlook, helping institutions detect emerging threats and make more informed decisions in real time. Rather than replacing experienced payment operations teams, AI enables them to focus on higher-risk exceptions where human judgment delivers the greatest value.
The greatest opportunity lies in deploying AI responsibly, supported by strong governance, operational oversight and client trust.
Resilience Is Built Through Collaboration
No organization can strengthen payment security alone. Cross-border payments rely on an interconnected ecosystem of financial institutions, payment providers, technology companies, regulators and market infrastructures.
Resilience also depends on stress testing, recovery exercises and business continuity planning within institutions. Organizations must continually evaluate their ability to respond to emerging threats and disruption scenarios before they occur.
As that ecosystem becomes more connected, collaboration becomes increasingly important.
Organizations including Swift, the Financial Stability Board and central banks around the world continue to emphasize the importance of common standards, information sharing and coordinated resilience across payment systems.²
The same industry collaboration that has accelerated payments modernization will also be essential to strengthening payment security.
Looking Ahead
The payments industry has spent years making the movement of money faster, more transparent and more efficient. The next step is ensuring security evolves just as quickly.
Success will depend on building payment ecosystems that continuously assess risk, establish trust through stronger identity and leverage technologies like AI to support better decisions in real time.
Equally important will be the industry's ability to collaborate across institutions and jurisdictions to address threats that no single organization can solve alone.
The institutions that earn the greatest trust will be those that make faster payments not only possible, but resilient by design.
Join Us at Sibos 2026
Session: Do safer payments mean slower payments?
Thursday, October 1 | 09:30 – 10:15 AM | Conference Stage 3
The future of payments depends on delivering both speed and security. As payment ecosystems continue to evolve, financial institutions, technology providers and regulators all have a role to play in building more resilient infrastructure.
Visit the Scotiabank team at Sibos to continue the conversation about building resilient payment strategies for a real-time world.
