Banks and
The most dangerous moment in fraud isn't when hackers breach systems — it's when victims genuinely believe they're making smart decisions, that are in actuality anything but. People actively being scammed rarely recognize their vulnerability and resist warnings that contradict their perceived reality.
Another industry faced with the same type of problem — people acting counter to their own benefit — is health care, and a burgeoning field of study provides an interesting analogue from which banks might learn how to better fight fraud with new technologies.
Over the past decade, medical researchers have pioneered an evidence-based discipline around AI-driven behavior change interventions, or AIDBCI. These successfully modify human behavior at scale by bypassing psychological resistance mechanisms that make conventional warnings ineffective. This approach has been traditionally deployed for helping people stop smoking, make healthier eating decisions or exercise more, but I believe it may hold the key to disrupting fraud by helping banking customers make better decisions.
The results speak for themselves.
The breakthrough lies in removing human judgment (e.g., by doctors) from intervention moments. When AI delivers objective,
Modern fraud exploits psychological manipulation rather than technical vulnerabilities. The same principles revolutionizing health care can help build safer banking practices by analyzing digital behavior signals indicating manipulation in progress — such as navigation hesitation, typing disruptions and device positioning suggesting active calls.
Rather than generic alerts, AI could deliver personalized education that explains why the content or correspondence is suspicious. Users might see highlighted manipulation techniques, visual cues identifying fraudulent elements and comparisons with legitimate communications. By understanding targeting tactics — deliberate misspellings, urgency language, spoofed logos — users can develop pattern recognition skills that extend beyond the immediate threat.
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This mirrors health care's success with
The key insight from health care is that effective intervention depends not only on identifying threats, but on understanding how individuals process them. AI systems can learn cognitive patterns — such as typical responses to urgency, trusted authority types and resonant social cues — then shape interventions accordingly.
Health care demonstrates that proactive intervention costs far less than reactive treatment. Similarly, customer empowerment systems require lower investment than fraud recovery, regulatory penalties and damaged relationships.
Drawing from health care's proven success with AI-driven behavior change, banks need two critical components to make this approach work in fraud prevention.
Banks already employ behavioral scientists extensively in marketing and sales divisions to influence customer decisions. This same expertise must be integrated into fraud prevention teams. Health care's success stems from combining technological capability with deep understanding of human psychology — banks need behavioral scientists working alongside fraud analysts to design interventions that account for cognitive biases, emotional states and decision-making patterns that fraudsters exploit.
Health care's behavior change model succeeds because it treats patients as partners in their own well-being rather than passive recipients of medical intervention. Banks must similarly shift from viewing customers as potential fraud victims to empowering them as informed decision-makers. This requires organizational commitment to transparency, education and collaborative fraud prevention rather than purely protective measures.
When banking customers develop a genuine understanding of how they're being targeted, they become partners in their own protection rather than passive recipients of security measures. This fundamental shift — from protecting transactions to protecting people — represents the future of financial security.
