Digital finance is reaching billions. Can we make it safe enough to trust?

Ploy runs a small café in Bangkok, Thailand, with nearly every aspect of her business run from her phone, from payments and orders to even the loan she took out to buy the espresso machine.

Thirty-four years old and digitally competent, she may not seem like the typical scam victim but it only took one intriguing social media chat to lure her into one.

Ploy found an investment group chat where a friendly “mentor” guided her through successful trades. The wins encouraged her, so she invested her savings and even borrowed more money. When she tried to withdraw her cash, however, her account was frozen and she received a fake “tax payment” demand.

Within minutes, her money was gone, sent overseas. She never told her family and, for months, was afraid to use her banking app. Ploy is a composite of common and real-life scams.

According to new figures and a “blueprint,” around 50-70% of adults worldwide have faced a scam attempt and those most at risk are often working-age, banked and digitally active. As Ploy’s story shows, the damage goes beyond money: it brings shame, stress and lost confidence in digital life, pushing people away from the very system built to include them.

Thailand and Southeast Asia have led the way in digital finance. Fast payment systems such as PromptPay, together with cross-border linkages with neighbouring countries, have brought people into the financial system at remarkable speed.

However, Ploy’s story reveals the darker side of that success. The same technology that connects people to opportunity can also connect criminals to victims. The cost isn't just individual.

What is lost is a broader misallocation of resources: savings for homes, education and small businesses are diverted into criminal networks, while banks, businesses and governments spend more defending against fraud than investing in innovation and growth.

That is why “safe and inclusive digital finance” will be a central focus at the 2026 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group in Bangkok. The message is simple: trust is not optional; it underpins digital finance.

Three problems threaten the safety and fairness of digital finance.

The first is fraud, scams and digital crime. What happened to Ploy is part of a cross-border industry, often run by organized criminal networks that costs the global economy an estimated $1 trillion a year.

In Thailand, losses reached $1.76 billion in 2024. Victims are increasingly manipulated into authorizing the payments themselves, a crime that traditional safeguards were not designed to catch.

The second is operational resilience. Financial services increasingly depend on a small number of large technology providers – cloud platforms, network infrastructure and more recently, artificial intelligence (AI) models.

When one critical provider fails, disruption can cascade across institutions and borders, as the world saw during the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Therefore, in an interconnected system, a single point of failure can quickly become a system-wide problem.

The third is fairness of access. Large digital platforms can lock users and their data inside "walled gardens," limiting choice. As AI increasingly decides who gets a loan or insurance, biased data can quietly shut out the very people digital finance is meant to include, such as the elderly, people with disabilities and people with limited financial histories or digital footprints.

These three problems differ in nature: one is a crime, the other is fragility and the third is inequity. However, they share the same consequence: all three erode trust.

Thailand’s journey offers a critical lesson: safety and inclusion are not competing goals. They reinforce each other.

Digital public infrastructure has given millions of Thais an easy, low-cost way into the financial system but as adoption surged, so did scams. This fraudulent activity has become increasingly organized, cutting across banks, mobile networks and social media platforms. No single institution has been able to stop them on its own.

Thailand’s response has therefore been multi-pronged: tightening controls on mule accounts, raising mobile-banking security standards, and introducing a shared-responsibility framework across banks, telecom operators and digital platforms.

Under this framework, each actor is accountable for helping prevent fraud. Since April 2025, financial institutions and other service providers that fall short of prescribed anti-fraud standards must share responsibility for resulting losses.

This shifts the burden from victims to providers: customers no longer have to prove that a provider failed; providers must show they had the required safeguards in place.

The economic logic is straightforward. Those who build and operate the system are best placed to make it safe and liability gives them a clear incentive to do so.

Thailand’s digital finance has made payments faster, easier and more connected, across accounts and borders. The lesson learned, however, is that a trusted digital system cannot rest on speed. It requires safety, resilience and responsibility built into every layer of the system.

The evolving nature of cyber-enabled fraud also means scams do not stop at national boundaries and stolen money can move between states within minutes through accounts, platforms and providers. A fragmented, country-by-country response is exactly what these networks exploit.

In 2018, the IMF and the World Bank Group launched the Bali Fintech Agenda, which helped countries embrace financial technology while managing its risks. It answered the question of that decade: how do we welcome digital finance?

This decade's question has changed: how do we defend it? Important work is already under way on cyber resilience and open, competitive markets.

Yet on cyber-enabled fraud – today’s most widespread threat to consumer trust – the world still lacks a comprehensive, shared playbook that reflects the cross-border and cross-sector nature of the problem.

The Bangkok Blueprint for Fraud-Resilient Financial Services, launching at the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF on 14 October, is designed to fill this gap. Developed with the IMF and the World Bank Group, the blueprint sets out 12 key considerations for policymakers, regulators and financial firms.

It focuses on five essentials:

The blueprint is not a new set of binding rules. It is a practical tool that helps countries at any stage of digital development identify vulnerabilities, act on them and learn from those that have already faced these challenges.

Individual countries and their regulators can't address the fraud challenge alone. In July, the World Economic Forum and the Bank of Thailand convened business leaders, policymakers and regulators in Bangkok to discuss promising solutions to tackle tech-driven financial crime.

Participants highlighted the need for thoughtful, multi-stakeholder, cross-border approaches, emphasising public-private collaboration and information sharing. Public-private dialogue on this important challenge remains a priority long after the Annual Meetings.