The EU Instant Payments Regulation (IPR), which came into force in October 2025, aims to increase efficiency, user-friendliness, and competitiveness, and to better position Europe in the global payments market. According to forecasts by Juniper Research, the transaction volume of real-time payments worldwide is expected to increase by 84 percent by 2029, exceeding US$110 trillion. However, with the increasing prevalence of real-time transfers, the risk of fraud also rises.
Speed as a systemic risk factor
Cybercriminals are exploiting the dynamically growing transaction volume of real-time payments: Immediate payment processing leaves little time for manual or subsequent interventions. So-called authorized push payment (APP) fraud is a major problem. In these cases, customers are deceptively prompted via phone, email, or messaging app to authorize a payment themselves. Unlike technical compromise, such as in classic card fraud, this involves deliberate manipulation – for example, through phishing. The payment is formally correct, and the transaction usually cannot be directly reversed.
Fraud prevention with preventive, context-based real-time assessment
Until now, fraud prevention systems could only review payments processed with a time delay after the fact. This conflict of objectives is exacerbated in the context of real-time transfers: decisions must be made within fractions of a second, achieving the highest possible success rate and generating as few false positives as possible.
Fraud prevention must therefore be implemented as a preventive, context-based, real-time assessment, rather than as a reactive control mechanism. Access to data is crucial here, as fraud is generally neither limited to individual customers nor to individual banks. Cybercriminals, for example, move funds across multiple institutions. Data-driven, AI-supported approaches can detect such complex patterns early on. They holistically integrate insights from various payment flows.
In addition to individual payments, they also analyze anonymized behavioral patterns, correlations, and anomalies across larger datasets. This allows for real-time risk assessment before a payment is processed. Practical examples show that these approaches increase fraud detection rates and reduce false alarms.
Keeping pace with real-time payment transactions
To secure real-time payments, banks don't need to completely rebuild their existing systems. With solutions like... Account-to-Account Protect Score from Visa They can quickly integrate a real-time risk score into their existing systems. For financial institutions that do not yet have suitable systems for securing account-to-account payments, or that wish to modernize their existing system, alternative, integrated solutions exist. One example is... Featurespace, Visa's fraud management platform is payment method agnostic and can therefore be used to protect various payment methods – such as (real-time) transfers or card payments.
Using AI-based risk analysis, the platform evaluates payments in real time. In addition to institution-specific data, the service also processes network-wide insights from transactions. Featurespace not only accesses transaction data from the selected payment method but also leverages insights from other payment methods processed by the bank. This provides banks with more context, faster decisions, and security measures that keep pace with real-time payment transactions.
Security as a key issue
As payment transactions become faster, trust must not be lost. Security is a strategic priority for banks. Integrated preventative mechanisms that protect against fraud not only benefit customer loyalty, but also the efficiency and reputation of banks.