SEON, the command centre for immediate Fraud Prevention and AML Compliance, has unveiled AI Reality Check: 2026 Fraud & AML Leaders Report, the second iteration of its sector research, derived from a worldwide survey of 1,010 leaders in fraud, risk, and compliance spanning payments, fintech, financial services, retail, eCommerce, and gaming.

The figures reveal an unforeseen narrative: AI is ubiquitous, yet operations are not becoming easier to manage. Currently, 98% of organizations utilize AI in fraud and AML processes, with 95% expressing confidence in its effectiveness; meanwhile, headcount plans rose from 88% to 94% year-over-year, and 83% anticipate budget increases in 2026.

Complexity Is Surpassing Automation

AI has not lessened the workload — it has revealed the extent of work that has always existed. Fraud losses are increasingly approaching revenue growth, threats are advancing more rapidly, and disjointed systems restrict the true potential of AI at scale. Key year-over-year shift:​

Leadership’s confidence in their teams’ performance is lagging. The number of leaders who disagreed with the statement, “fraud losses are growing faster than revenue,”​ dropped by almost 40% from the previous year

Inside the Numbers:​

AI is baseline, not experimental​

• 98% already integrate AI into daily workflows (only 2% still planning)​
• 95% are confident AI can detect and prevent fraud (52% very confident)​
• Top use case: AI/ML for transaction monitoring (30%)​

Fraud and AML investment keeps climbing​

• 83% expect fraud/AML budgets to increase in 2026​
• 94% plan to add at least one full-time hire (up from 88% in 2025)​
• 85% plan to add a vendor, 49% plan to replace one​

Fragmentation is the bottleneck​

• 95% claim “some integration” between fraud and AML systems​
• Only 47% run fully integrated workflows; the rest rely on partial connections​
• 80% say getting a unified view of data is challenging​

For many, time-to-value remains slow​

Only 10% go live in under two weeks​
38% take 1–3 months, 24% take 4+ months​
When implementations run long, top impacts include increased costs (52%) and prolonged fraud exposure (47%)​

Teams are growing, not shrinking​

94% plan to increase headcount despite automation gains​
85% see AI agents as support/augmentation, not replacement (only 12% see eventual replacement)​

Top fraud threats reported:​

• Account takeovers: 26%
• Promo/discount abuse: 18%
• Return fraud: 18%​

“Fraud and financial crime were supposed to become more manageable as AI matured,” said Tamas Kadar, CEO and co-founder, SEON. “Instead, 2026 is the year leaders are confronting a more complicated reality. AI adoption is real, confidence is high, but the scale and pace of fraud — compounded by fragmented systems — continue to drive increased investment rather than reduced overhead. The bottleneck is no longer whether AI works. It’s everything around it: disconnected data, siloed teams, slow implementations. The organisations that pull ahead will be the ones that unify fraud and AML intelligence, shorten the distance between threats and controls, and treat integration as strategy, not plumbing.”​

Fast-Growing Companies Invest in Integration Early​

Organisations growing 51%+ are nearly twice as likely as slower peers to report that achieving unified visibility is “not very challenging.” They treat integration as infrastructure, not an IT project.​

What’s Next: From “Does AI Work?” to “Can We Trust It?”​

With adoption near-universal, the conversation is shifting to governance, explainability and accountability:​

• 78% say decentralised digital identity will become central to fraud/AML​
• 33% cite data privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) as the biggest external force shaping AML​
• 25% point to criminals’ advancing use of AI and obfuscation techniques​

The post Despite AI’s Rise, Fraud Teams Keep Growing — SEON 2026 Report appeared first on Eastern European Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

eyeDP, the innovative provider of AI-powered document verification technology, has announced a strategic partnership with idvcheck, an international identity verification and customer acquisition specialist.

Per the partnership, eyeDP’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) services will be integrated into the idvcheck platform, enhancing existing systems to help clients maintain their AML obligations across iGaming, fintech, financial services, and other regulated sectors.

Additionally, idvcheck will integrate eyeDP’s core document verification services including data extraction from unstructured documents; AI-powered data summarisation; content validation; and document tamper and fraud detection. to boost efficiency across its service offering.

This two-way partnership will see idvcheck’s manual review and forensic investigation workflows being fully integrated into eyeDP’s platform, providing built-in failsafe for cases that cannot be automatically verified or more sophisticated requests that require further intervention. This combination of AI-powered verification and human expertise will provide the highest quality document verification and AML protection in the market.

idvcheck currently verifies documents from around 200 countries worldwide, specialising in white-labelled customer acquisition services. By integrating eyeDP’s AML technology, idvcheck will be able to process a higher volume of straightforward cases, more efficiently, whilst enabling its team to focus their expertise on more complex tasks.

Jess Whitehouse, Director of Customer Operations, at eyeDP, said: “This partnership gets 2026 off to a strong start for eyeDP as we continue to grow and establish ourselves as one of the leading document processing companies on the market.

idvcheck has a strong, international presence that will allow our platform to showcase its ability on a larger scale. Together, we can continue to develop identity and document verification solutions that provide efficient, reliable safety checks for our partners.”

Andy Pinks, Chief Operating Officer at Idvcheck, said: “During extensive testing, the benefits of integrating eyeDP’s technology into our existing infrastructure became quickly apparent. Although (at least in its current form) AI cannot replace human experience, the symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence has created immediate operational improvements. This enables us to deliver a more cost-effective and time-efficient service, to all markets, without compromising on quality.

We are excited to be working in partnership with eyeDP to deliver new and innovative products that satisfy the ever-evolving needs of our clients.

The post eyeDP Partners with idvcheck to Provide Anti-Money Laundering Solutions appeared first on Eastern European Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.