Indonesian Banks Race to Deploy Real-Time Fraud Detection as Scams Surge

Senior banking executives in Jakarta have warned that sophisticated cross-border scams are overwhelming traditional fraud detection systems, prompting urgent calls for real-time analytics and greater industry collaboration. The warnings emerged at a high-level roundtable where technology providers and financial institutions discussed how artificial intelligence is simultaneously enabling criminals and strengthening defenses.

Background and Context

Indonesia's financial sector is grappling with a surge in fraudulent activity that authorities estimate cost the economy approximately IDR 700 billion (USD 45 million) between November 2024 and February 2025. According to Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK), the proliferation of scams spans 18 categories including illegal investments, online shopping fraud, and social media deception. The scale of losses prompted the OJK to establish the Indonesian Anti-Scam Center (IASC) in November 2024 to coordinate responses across the financial sector.

Key Figures and Entities

The Jakarta roundtable brought together representatives from leading technology firms and financial institutions, including Sai Prasad, chief technology officer at Google Cloud Indonesia, Richard Booth, senior vice president for Asia Pacific at behavioral biometrics firm BioCatch, and Johnny Simons, head of digital fraud analytics at ANZ Bank. Participants emphasized that the increasingly sophisticated nature of scams—often orchestrated from outside Indonesia—requires coordinated responses across the banking sector and technology providers.

Legal and Financial Mechanisms

Technology providers demonstrated emerging approaches to fraud detection that analyze thousands of data points during digital banking sessions. BioCatch's system reportedly examines up to 3,000 behavioral signals—including typing patterns, device attributes, and network characteristics—throughout every millisecond of online banking activity. This granular monitoring enables banks to intervene before fraudulent transactions complete by either blocking payments or requiring additional authentication.

A significant development discussed was the launch of bank-to-bank intelligence sharing networks that maintain customer privacy while enhancing fraud detection. The BioCatch network, initiated in Australia in late 2024, uses encrypted and hashed data to provide risk indicators between banks without sharing raw customer information. This approach has helped identify sophisticated scams such as business email compromise and voice impersonation schemes by flagging suspicious recipient accounts across participating institutions.

International Implications and Policy Response

The roundtable highlighted growing tension between regulatory demands for instant payments and the need for robust security measures. Australia's New Payments Platform (NPP), which enables person-to-person transfers within seconds, has created particular pressure on banks to develop real-time analytics that can identify fraud without introducing processing delays that would breach service-level agreements. Johnny Simons from ANZ Bank noted that targeted friction—rather than blanket slowdowns—had helped reduce scam losses by AUD 700 million in Australia over the past year, contrasting with stable losses in Hong Kong and increases in Singapore.

Participants warned that as major financial centers strengthen their fraud controls, criminal operations are displacing activity to countries with less robust defenses, creating a pressing need for regional coordination. Google Cloud's Sai Prasad noted ongoing collaboration with Swift to develop anti-fraud technologies using federated learning, which allows global fraud detection models to train across multiple banks without sharing sensitive customer data.

Sources

This report draws on statements from the Indonesian banking roundtable in Jakarta, official data from Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK), and public information from technology providers including Google Cloud and BioCatch. Additional context comes from reporting on regional fraud trends and regulatory developments across the Asia-Pacific financial sector.