India

That adaptability is a central theme of “Financial Scams and Consumer Trust,” a November report produced by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with Block.

Based on a U.S. census-balanced survey of more than 15,000 consumers, the research finds that nearly one in five U.S. adults has experienced at least one scam in the past five years, underscoring how deeply fraud has embedded itself in everyday financial life.

Younger, Digital-First Consumers Are Most at Risk

One of the report’s most striking findings upends long-held assumptions about who is most vulnerable. Younger generations, not older ones, face the highest exposure. About 24% of millennials and 22% of Generation Z consumers report having been scammed in the past five years, compared with 14% of baby boomers and seniors.

College-educated consumers are also more likely to be victims than those without a degree, reflecting greater digital engagement and exposure.

The channels matter. Email and phone calls remain the most common entry points overall, but social media plays an outsized role for Gen Z, accounting for nearly one-quarter of first scam contacts among that cohort. Across age groups, fraudsters overwhelmingly rely on impersonation, posing as trusted companies, banks, government agencies or even personal contacts.

Technology as an Enabler for Scammers

Technology has lowered both the cost and the speed of fraud. Scammers increasingly use digital marketplaces, peer-to-peer payment rails and AI-enabled impersonation tools to make schemes more convincing. Speed is a core weapon: nearly two-thirds of victims make a payment within 24 hours of first contact, and many do so within minutes. In more than half of cases, victims send money directly; in the rest, they unknowingly provide account credentials that allow funds to be drained.

The Top Five Scams Targeting Consumers

• Fake debt collection (18%): Fraudsters pose as collectors demanding immediate payment. Victims span income and age groups, with strong impact across generations.
• Scams leading to identity theft (16%): Stolen personal data is used to access or open accounts. These scams are especially damaging and frequently reported to banks.
• Gift card scams (15%): Victims are pressured to buy and share gift card codes. Younger consumers and bridge millennials are disproportionately affected.
• Fake eCommerce or marketplace scams (14%): Nonexistent goods are sold online, with older consumers more likely to report these as their most costly incidents.
• Investment scams (8%): Though less common, they cause the largest losses, with median household losses exceeding $3,000 and heavy use of cryptocurrency payments.

How Technology Can Also Be the Defense

The report makes clear that prevention and response are inseparable. Consumers who report scams to their financial institutions are far more likely to recover funds, and trust rebounds sharply when recovery occurs.

For banks and FinTechs, the defenses increasingly hinge on technology: real-time transaction monitoring, confirmation prompts that slow high-risk payments, stronger identity verification and clearer reporting pathways inside apps and online banking portals. Just as important is education that helps consumers recognize impersonation tactics and urgency cues before money moves.

Fraud may be relentless, but the data shows it is not unbeatable. Faster detection, clearer communication and earlier intervention can reduce losses, preserve trust and keep consumers engaged in the digital economy.

At PYMNTS Intelligence, we work with businesses to uncover insights that fuel intelligent, data-driven discussions on changing customer expectations, a more connected economy and the strategic shifts necessary to achieve outcomes. With rigorous research methodologies and unwavering commitment to objective quality, we offer trusted data to grow your business. As our partner, you’ll have access to our diverse team of PhDs, researchers, data analysts, number crunchers, subject matter veterans and editorial experts.

Case in point: Microsoft. It’s pushing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) deeper into retail operations, positioning intelligent automation as a unifying layer across the entire retail value chain.

In an announcement last week the company said its new agentic AI capabilities are designed to help retailers move faster, operate more efficiently and engage shoppers with greater relevance by augmenting human decision-making rather than replacing it. The approach focuses on connecting traditionally fragmented functions — merchandising, marketing, store operations and fulfillment — into coordinated workflows that can anticipate needs and act in real time. According to Microsoft, this shift reflects a broader industry move toward intelligence-driven retail operating models built for speed, resilience and scale.

A central element of the strategy is agentic commerce, where AI agents guide shoppers from discovery to purchase while reducing friction for both consumers and merchants. Microsoft highlighted Copilot Checkout, which allows shoppers to complete purchases directly within conversational experiences without being redirected to external sites, while merchants remain the merchant of record.

The company also introduced brand-specific shopping agents, catalog enrichment tools and store operations agents designed to improve personalization, product discovery, frontline efficiency and inventory management. Together, these tools aim to help retailers boost conversion, reduce returns and empower store associates with real-time insights, while giving enterprises a more adaptive foundation as shopping behavior shifts toward AI-driven interactions.

“With Microsoft’s agentic AI,” read a corporate blog post, “retailers can automate what slows them down and amplify what sets them apart, enabling faster decisions and stronger customer relationships while building operations ready for whatever comes next.”

Retail Is Detail

Bain focused its thought leadership for the two events on the “retail is detail” theme, integrating merchandising into the agentic conversation. Bain argues that the next phase of retail merchandising will be defined less by better analysis and more by faster, smarter execution, enabled by agentic AI. 

In its January brief, “Reimagining Merchandising in the Era of Agentic AI,” Bain describes how growing assortment complexity, proliferating channels and rising shopper expectations have overwhelmed traditional merchandising models that still rely heavily on spreadsheets and manual processes.

The firm contends that the core challenge is no longer access to data, but the ability to consistently translate that data into high-quality decisions at speed. Agentic AI shifts the focus from analyzing outcomes after the fact to embedding intelligent decision support directly into day-to-day workflows, allowing merchants to reason across fragmented signals and respond dynamically as conditions change.

The report outlines how agentic AI can transform both strategic category management and everyday execution, from assortment planning and pricing to promotions, inventory allocation and supplier negotiations. Unlike traditional analytics, AI agents can monitor structured and unstructured data in real time, recommend actions within defined guardrails and, in some cases, execute those actions autonomously with human oversight.

Bain emphasizes that the biggest gains come when technology is paired with redesigned roles, processes and AI literacy, following a “crawl-walk-run” approach that delivers measurable value within months.

Merchandising, Bain concludes, is the natural starting point for broader retail transformation, because decisions made there cascade across supply chains, stores and digital channels. Retailers that move early can convert productivity gains into structurally better outcomes, while those that delay risk having their strategies shaped by external AI agents rather than their own.

The Global View

With the two big trade events bookending this week’s edition of The Prompt Economy Weekly, it’s easy to perceive it as a U.S.-centric issue. It’s not. In fact, a recent post in The AI Journal defines some unique characteristics of different geographies as they navigate this new world.

A new analysis from The AI Journal argues that agentic AI is moving from experimentation to execution in retail, with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region emerging as a clear early leader.

In the article “Agentic AI in Retail: Why MENA Is Pulling Ahead and What Europe Should Do Next,” Infobip retail specialist Kim Johal writes that retailers globally now see AI as the foundation of their transformation agendas, not a side project. Agentic AI systems, which can make decisions and take actions with a high degree of independence, are enabling a step change in customer engagement by orchestrating multistep, context-aware interactions across channels. These capabilities are driving tangible benefits, including operational efficiency, hyper-personalized offers at scale, persistent omnichannel conversations and improved security through automated identity verification and anomaly detection.

The article highlights stark regional differences in adoption. MENA retailers are moving faster than their European counterparts largely because they face fewer legacy technology constraints, operate in markets where consumers are more receptive to AI-driven interactions, and benefit from stronger public and private investment in digital transformation.

By contrast, European retailers contend with older systems, stricter regulatory scrutiny and more cautious consumer sentiment, leading to slower, more risk-managed rollouts.

Johal argues that while Europe will eventually catch up, competitive advantage will accrue to retailers that deploy agentic AI against clear business objectives, supported by clean, connected data and strong governance. The immediate payoff is cost savings and faster response times, but the longer-term prize is new forms of personalization, loyalty and commerce that redefine how customers interact with brands.

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The bank is expanding its payment services in the country to help clients process and move money globally, as well as pursuing partnerships with Indian FinTechs that focus on cross-border flows, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Oct. 9), citing its interview with Guhaprasath Rajagopal, head of payments for India at JPMorgan Chase.

These moves are driven by multinationals’ growing use of global capability centers located in India as well as Indian companies’ push into overseas markets, according to the report.

“With our global network and full range of treasury services and trade solutions, we help Indian businesses seize global opportunities and navigate complex markets,” Rajagopal said, per the report.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and Citi collaboration “The Treasury Management Playbook: Spotlight on Cross-Border Payments” found that cross-border payments are more important than ever and that companies are looking to minimize the frictions associated with international transactions.

The report found that the three most commonly cited pain points are slow speeds, lack of transparency and high costs, and that the more a business looks abroad for new markets and customers, the more important seamless and efficient cross-border payments become.

In another recent development in this space, non-custodial stablecoin wallet MiniPay said Wednesday (Oct. 8) that it integrated Noah’s financial infrastructure to enable freelancers, creators and sellers to receive global payouts.

The companies’ collaboration aims to meet the needs of the growing number of freelancers in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and South Asia.

“People want to get paid like a local — without the maze of cross-border fees and delays,” MiniPay Head of Commercial Murray Spark said in a press release.

Payment service provider Coinflow said Wednesday that it raised $25 million in new funding to help boost adoption of what it called the world’s first unified global pay-in and payout infrastructure with instant settlement using stablecoins.

Coinflow works with merchants in industries that include marketplaces, FinTechs, gaming, payroll, eCommerce and remittances.

“Payments systems are still stuck in a patchwork of local networks, riddled with delays, fraud, and unnecessary costs,” Coinflow Co-founder and CEO Daniel Lev said in a press release. “Coinflow solves this by unifying global rails into one instant, secure settlement layer.”

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Starting Oct. 8, users of the United Payments Interface (UPI) will be able to approve payments with facial recognition and fingerprints, Reuters reported Tuesday (Oct. 7), citing three sources familiar with the matter.

Authentications will be carried out using biometric data stored under the Indian government’s unique identification system, Aadhar, one of the sources told Reuters.

PYMNTS has contacted the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates UPI, for comment but has not yet gotten a response.

The Reuters report notes that this move comes in the wake of new guidelines from India’s central bank allowing alternative methods of authentication, departing from the current system, which requires a PIN to authenticate payments.

The sources added that the NPCI is planning to demonstrate the new biometric feature at the Global Fintech Festival, happening this week in Mumbai.

As covered here earlier this year, UPI has boomed in popularity since it was introduced nearly 10 years ago, and has begun to rival Visa in terms of number of transactions, handling upwards 600 million each day in July.

The system’s introduction in 2016 “further accelerated the transition to digital payments, leveraging the existing trend of Indian citizens using mobile phones for various transactions,” as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.

PYMNTS has documented the popularity of biometric authentication in other parts of the world. For example, research from the 2025 “Global Digital Shopping Index: UAE Edition” found that 32% of shoppers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have used biometric authentication such as fingerprint or facial recognition technology to make their latest online transaction. 

This number is nearly double the global average rate of 18.5% and represents the second-highest level recorded across all countries by PYMNTS Intelligence.

“This high rate of adoption underscores a strong consumer preference for convenient yet secure methods of verifying purchases,” PYMNTS wrote in June.

“For financial institutions and payment processors, this signals a clear imperative: supporting and enhancing biometric payment solutions is no longer a niche offering but a mainstream expectation among UAE consumers.”

Biometrics are also playing an important role in the credit union (CU) space, with 64% of CUs telling PYMNTS Intelligence they plan to use things like facial recognition to enhance security.