Over the past decade, there has been a 28 percentage-point increase in the number of adults with a financial account such as savings or checking, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 report – 79% of adults around the world now hold such a product. In East Asia and Pacific, this kind of formal saving rose by 20 percentage points between 2021 and 2024, the largest increase of any region.
Digital financial tools such as mobile money accounts, bank accounts linked to a card or phone and digital payments made at shops and online, have been a key driver of this access because they allow people to have more control over their financial futures.
These tools also expose consumers to scams and other forms of digital financial fraud, however. Nearly 60% of adults told the Global Anti-Scam Alliance that they had experienced a scam in 2025, and nearly a quarter lost money as a result.
New digital financial tools require new solutions to tackle financial crime. And while technology can play a role in these solutions, human judgement, emotional intelligence and leadership by people are all essential to building trust and protecting consumers.
Here’s how two financial sector CEOs believe this can happen in the Asia-Pacific region.
Digital safety means protecting people at the point of risk
Noman Azhar, CEO, Zindigi-JS Bank
In Pakistan, digital financial services have brought millions of people – many of them first-time users on a basic mobile phone – into the formal financial system. That reach is also where risk concentrates.
The main digital safety threats – phishing, vishing and impersonation calls, password theft, SIM-swaps and account takeovers, cloned apps and mule accounts used to move stolen funds – target the person rather than the core system. The instant payment infrastructure providers that connect payers and payees have brought convenience and efficiency but have also raised the stakes for financial crime because a fraudulent transfer completed in seconds is far harder to recover from such services.
Assuming every customer will eventually be targeted, protection cannot rest on vigilance alone. Secure coding practices and applications that terminate themselves as soon as they detect remote access through an automated tool can help. Financial institutions can layer other tools such as biometric authentication and real-time behavioural monitoring around this.
Other effective approaches for protection include applying cooling-off periods after high-risk events such as a new device purchases, SIM changes, new payees or limit increases. This gives a customer time to reconsider and the bank time to intervene. The principle is targeted friction: Slow down high-risk transactions and keep low-risk ones seamless because security that excludes users defeats financial inclusion.
A bank's services and controls can also be licensed to fintechs, electronic money institutions (EMIs), aggregators, telecom companies and technology vendors. But each integration becomes a potential entry point and responsibility does not transfer with the service – the regulated entity remains accountable.
Banks must therefore treat these partners as an extension of their own control environment. Regulators can support this with clear, proportionate standards for licensing partnerships, so that faster innovation does not come at the cost of accountability.
Fraud does not respect institutional boundaries. A scam may begin on a telecom network or social platform, passing through one institution and landing in another. But most defences remain institution-specific.
Private sector leaders should share intelligence on mule accounts, devices and malware across banks, EMIs, fintechs and telecom companies. The public sector needs regulator-supervised, privacy-protected frameworks for this exchange, as well as faster coordination for freezing and recovery of funds, and joint awareness campaigns.
Digital financial services can deliver financial inclusion only if users trust them, and that trust is built collectively.
Cross-border solutions to digital safety
Bill Deng Guobiao, Founder & CEO, XTransfer
As digital financial services become more deeply embedded in cross-border commerce, fraud prevention increasingly depends on combining technology, human judgement and institutional cooperation. Technology can dramatically improve the speed and consistency of screening, but it cannot replace experienced human judgement.
More companies now rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to review transactions, for example. But there are still cases where human review and judgement is essential. While many transaction reviews can be automated, some require experienced compliance professionals to assess context, investigate anomalies and respond to emerging typologies.
Frontline teams also matter. In B2B payments, understanding the underlying business and commercial substance of a transaction can be as important as analyzing the payment itself. This combination of technology, expertise and human judgement is essential to building safety into digital finance.
Asia-Pacific offers a particularly useful environment for developing and testing these approaches because its markets differ widely in regulation, payment infrastructure, customer behaviour and fraud patterns. One model can’t simply be exported everywhere. Rather, common risk principles and typology frameworks can provide a shared foundation, while controls should be calibrated to local conditions.
Intelligence identified in one market or payment corridor can also serve as an early-warning signal elsewhere, helping institutions respond faster as fraud techniques migrate across borders. Greater and more responsible information sharing can therefore strengthen protection without requiring every market to adopt identical regulatory or operational models.
The same principle applies to payment infrastructure. In Asia-Pacific, cross-border payments for small and medium enterprises remain fragmented across banks, payment providers, jurisdictions and risk frameworks. More connected infrastructure could help bring together broader payment reach, richer risk intelligence and more consistent controls across the region.
Fraud does not begin or end within the financial system. Social platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, telecommunications providers and other digital services also form part of the fraud chain. And financial institutions, payment providers, technology platforms, regulators and law-enforcement authorities each have a view of different parts of the risk landscape. Sustained public-private engagement is essential.
Closer dialogue and more timely information sharing could help surface emerging threats earlier, as well as clarifying responsibilities and strengthening accountability across the digital finance ecosystem.
