Payments fraud is rapidly evolving into one of the most complex and costly threats confronting corporate treasury and finance teams. A new report by Veriff, The Future of Payments, highlights the scale of the challenge: the attempted fraud rate in the payments sector surged 89% over the past year, pushing the industry firmly into a “high-risk” category. Behind this dramatic rise is a 3.6-fold increase in sophisticated AI-driven threats, according to the Veriff report, including deepfakes and digitally manipulated identities designed to bypass traditional security controls in seconds.

For corporate treasurers, CFOs, and payments professionals, this shift marks a new chapter in the payments security landscape. Fraud is no longer limited to phishing emails or invoice manipulation. Instead, it increasingly involves AI-enabled impersonation attacks, executive deepfakes, and highly personalized social engineering campaigns that exploit technological, human, and organizational vulnerabilities.

At the same time, cybercriminals now view corporate executives’ personal digital lives as one of the easiest gateways into the organization. By infiltrating executives’ personal devices and home networks with malware, deepfakes, fake accounts, and ransomware, threat actors are exploiting these weaker touchpoints to gain entry into critical corporate infrastructure that was once considered secure.

As payments continue to sit at the centre of corporate financial operations, strengthening payments intelligence and employee training to combat new age fraud threats is becoming as critical as deploying new technologies.

Two major payments security challenges: deepfake fraud and executives’ personal digital lives

The rise of deepfake technology has significantly amplified the threat of payments fraud. Advances in generative AI now allow criminals to replicate voices, faces, and communication styles with startling accuracy. In increasingly common scenarios, finance teams receive urgent payment requests from what appears to be a senior finance executive—often delivered through staged video calls, voice cloning, or highly realistic fraudulent emails.

What makes this threat even more concerning is how easily these digital clones can be created. Publicly available audio or video—from conference presentations, media interviews, webinars, podcasts, or earnings calls—can be used to generate convincing deepfakes. In today’s environment, you do not need to be a high-profile treasurer or CFO to become a target. If you are responsible for initiating or approving high-value financial transactions, you are already a potential target.

These attacks are particularly dangerous because they exploit established trust within organizations. A convincing deepfake impersonation can pressure employees into bypassing normal verification procedures, potentially exposing organizations to significant financial losses.

Beyond the immediate financial impact, such deception can undermine corporate credibility, erode customer and investor trust, and negatively affect sales, partnerships, and even stock prices.

Recognizing these risks, industry resources such as Strategic Treasurer’s white paper  Deepfakes & Payments Fraud: Is Treasury Prepared? offer valuable insights into the evolving deepfake landscape and pragmatic countermeasures organizations can adopt to stay ahead of digital fabrications.  ⃰

Another important resource for corporations is Strategic Treasurer’s latest white paper, Protecting Executives’ Personal Digital Lives Against Cyber Threats. The white paper serves as a call to action for treasury and payments professionals to confront a major threat hiding in plain sight: cybercriminals targeting corporate executives where they least expect it—their personal digital lives. It also outlines key security measures that treasury and payments teams can implement to strengthen the personal digital lives and assets of their executives.

Together, these insights reinforce an important reality: defending against modern payments fraud requires not only stronger technology, but also greater intelligence, awareness, and training across the organization.

The role of ongoing and tailored payments security training

While technology and internal controls remain vital, many experts agree that people remain the most critical line of defence against payments fraud. Training employees to recognize emerging fraud tactics can significantly reduce an organization’s exposure to financial crime.

According to the 2026 Cybersecurity Guide for CFOs by Eftsure, effective payments security requires finance teams to understand both the tactics used by malicious actors and the potential consequences of compromised payment workflows. The guide emphasizes that technology and processes are only effective when employees understand why controls exist and how to enforce them—even under pressure.

This is particularly important for treasury, accounts payable (AP), and finance professionals who operate on the frontline of payment execution. Regular and tailored training programmes should therefore include the following, as outlined in Eftsure’s cybersecurity guide:

• Real-world examples of fraud attempts involving AI-generated voices, deepfake videos, and sophisticated email spoofing.
• Training to recognize warning signals such as unexpected urgency, unusual payment requests, or deviations from established procedures and patterns.
• Organizational cultures that encourage employees to question suspicious instructions—even when they appear to come from senior leaders or executives.

The Eftsure guide notes that building this culture of awareness empowers employees to identify anomalies and challenge suspicious requests before financial damage occurs.

Leveraging specialized payments security training: SecureTreasury and SECURE CLAMPS

Corporate treasury and payments teams can also benefit from specialized, proactive payments security training that can help mitigate payments fraud and reduce its impact in a world of faster and instant payments.

One example is the SecureTreasury™ cloud-based payment security training platform.

SecureTreasury delivers payments security training to treasury and payments teams globally through a user-friendly digital platform. The programme enables organizations to educate employees across regions and time zones about common fraud tactics, areas of organizational vulnerability, and leading practices for strengthening payment controls within a comprehensive treasury security framework.

Among the most valuable aspects of the SecureTreasury curriculum are the twelve payment security principles referred to by the mnemonic “SECURE CLAMPS.” These principles help treasurers and their teams understand the security frameworks within their organizations and proactively defend against attempted payments fraud.

For organizations seeking an insightful introduction to these concepts, Strategic Treasurer’s eBook  Payment Security & Fraud Prevention presents the SECURE CLAMPS principles in a distilled format derived from a portion of the SecureTreasury course. This eBook equips treasury and payments professionals with the necessary payment security intelligence to combat the growing menace of payments fraud.

Building a culture of payments security intelligence

Ultimately, combating modern payments fraud requires a multi-layered approach that combines technology, training, and intelligence. Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging automation, artificial intelligence, and sophisticated social-engineering tactics to exploit weaknesses in payment workflows.

For corporate treasury teams, this means that payment security must evolve beyond static controls and one-time training sessions. Instead, organizations should develop ongoing education programmes, continuously updated fraud intelligence, and structured security frameworks that enable employees to detect and respond to emerging threats.

In a payments environment defined by speed, automation, and global connectivity, the organizations best positioned to defend against payments fraud will be those that empower their employees with both cutting-edge knowledge and tools.

As the payments ecosystem continues to expand—and as cyber saboteurs increasingly harness AI to accelerate fraud—the ability of treasury teams to combine consistent payments security training, structured frameworks such as SECURE CLAMPS, and continuous fraud intelligence may prove to be one of the most important defences against the next generation of payments fraud.

 

 

⃰ Disclosure: Strategic Treasurer owns CTMfile.