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Ireland Lost €179 Million to Payment Fraud Last Year, Most of It Approved by the Victims. Bank of Ireland Is Putting AI Between the Customer and the Transfer

Bank of Ireland's AI scam-detection system has assessed about 2.9 million transactions as Irish payment fraud rose 27% to €179 million. The bank's new chief AI officer, Prag Sharma, told The Irish Times on October 22, 2026 that the bank is "accelerating" AI across fraud detection, card disputes and customer guidance. Central Bank of Ireland figures show authorised push-payment scams, where victims approve the payment themselves, now make up 45% of fraud by value, which is exactly the kind of loss a rule-based filter struggles to stop.

Oct 23, 2026

Start with the number the bank is reacting to. The Central Bank of Ireland's payment fraud statistics, published in September 2026, put the value of fraudulent payments in 2025 at €179.04 million, up 27.2% from €140.80 million a year earlier, even though the number of fraudulent transactions rose only marginally. The growth came from scams in which the customer is talked into approving the payment: authorised push-payment fraud reached €74.86 million, 45% of the total by value, up from 35.2% in 2024. Cross-border payments, money sent to accounts outside Ireland, accounted for 69.8% of the fraudulent value. Fraud still touches only about one payment in every 10,000; the problem is how much each one now takes.

That is the backdrop to what Bank of Ireland, the country's largest domestic lender by assets, described to The Irish Times on October 22, 2026. Its AI-powered scam-detection technology has assessed about 2.9 million customer transactions, the bank said, and AI is now built into its fraud-detection software as well as into the financial-wellbeing insights it gives customers. Prag Sharma, who became the bank's chief AI officer on October 1, said: "A lot of good stuff has already happened and I now need to accelerate that across the board in a safe manner."

The reason a push-payment scam needs a different tool is that nothing about it looks like fraud to a traditional system. The customer logs in from their own phone, passes every authentication step and sends money to a payee they typed in themselves. A rule-based filter checks credentials and limits; a model trained on behaviour can notice that this customer has never paid this kind of account, at this time, for this amount, after a phone call, and pause the payment for a question. Whether that pause comes early enough, and how often it interrupts honest payments, is what decides whether the technology helps; the bank did not publish a figure for scams stopped or false alarms.

The other numbers the bank gave are about service rather than fraud. A generative AI "benefits finder" launched in April has been used 31,000 times and identified €55 million in potential tax refunds for customers; more than four in five card-dispute chargeback cases now close within three days; call transfers in the contact centre have fallen by more than 40%; and 127 million AI-generated spending insights were sent to customers last year. Almost 7,000 employees have been trained on AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, which the bank estimates saves staff up to half an hour a day. All of these are the bank's own figures, reported by the newspaper, not independently audited results.

Irish banks will not be judged on this alone. The Central Bank of Ireland, which lists AI among its supervisory priorities for 2026, has said firms stay fully accountable for what their AI systems do, including systems built or run by suppliers. The measurable test for Bank of Ireland's acceleration will come in next September's fraud statistics: if push-payment losses keep growing faster than payment volumes, the models are not yet catching the scams that matter.

Sources: The Irish Times — Bank of Ireland 'accelerating' AI's role in fraud detection and financial guidance (Oct 22, 2026); Law Society Gazette — Value of fraudulent payments up 27% last year (Sep 2026); Irish Legal News — Push-payment scams drive fraud losses to €179m (Sep 2026)