Fraud Strategy shifts the burden upstream – and banks are in the firing line
Key takeaways
- For banks, the message is clear: reimbursement is no longer the end of the story, prevention is becoming a core market obligation.Fraud has become too large for the UK’s law enforcement to handle alone.
- It is yet another compliance shift for a sector already expected to carry out diligence on customers, monitor and detect suspicious transactions, and provide reimbursements.
- On the financial services sector, the Strategy is polite about the progress banks have made.
Fraud Strategy shifts the burden upstream – and banks are in the firing line Retail Banker International · Ten Pixels/shutterstock Global Data Tue, June 9, 2026 at 11:39 PM GMT+7 5 min read The UK’s new Fraud Strategy is not just a tougher stance on criminals, it is a blueprint for pushing fraud prevention onto the infrastructure providers that may enable frauds to scale. For banks, the message is clear: reimbursement is no longer the end of the story, prevention is becoming a core market obligation.Fraud has become too large for the UK’s law enforcement to handle alone. The Government’s Fraud Strategy 2026-2029 (the “Strategy”) describes fraud as the UK’s largest crime type, with an economic cost of at least £14.4bn in 2023-24. The Strategy commits over £250m from 2026-2029 and involves three pillars: Disrupt, Safeguard and Respond. For banks, the most important message sits beneath that structure: fraud prevention is moving upstream.
It is yet another compliance shift for a sector already expected to carry out diligence on customers, monitor and detect suspicious transactions, and provide reimbursements. The Strategy points to something even broader; the increasing expectation that banks have fraud controls embedded into product design, onboarding journeys, payment flows, authentication, account security, customer communications and mule detection. Reacting well after a fraud event will not be enough.
On the financial services sector, the Strategy is polite about the progress banks have made. It recognises the Retail Banking Fraud Charter of 2021, Confirmation of Payee, the Banking Protocol, and the mandatory reimbursement regime for eligible authorised push payment frauds (“APP Fraud”), which returned £173m to victims in its first year. But the same section makes clear that the current approach has not solved the problem. At least £629.3m was stolen in the first half of 2025 alone, including £371.8m of unauthorised fraud.