This year, Financial Inclusion Week will kick off on October 5 under the theme of Inclusive Innovation: Building Financial Systems That Work for Everyone. Innovation, as we’ll see over four days of the convening, is driving exciting changes and creating new promises for our work as a sector. Across more than 60 live sessions, the event will span financial health, inclusive technology, women’s financial inclusion, financial literacy, resilience, and artificial intelligence, among other topics.
As we tackle how to close the final frontier of access and expand clients’ financial health, the challenge for us is to consider both the opportunities and the risks — and how we intentionally work towards a responsible and inclusive approach to innovation.
Innovation isn’t just about technology, although Financial Inclusion Week will cover artificial intelligence, digital public infrastructure, stablecoins, and new digital products and services aimed at closing the inclusion gap. At FIW 2026, we will talk about innovation of many kinds: in financing, payment systems, funding, policy, and product design, and even in how we think about collaboration — across borders and across sectors. As we consider who gets left behind and the clients who might lose trust during this time of progress, we will review innovation in how we tackle the growing threat of fraud and scams, and how we might work better together to ensure the safety of consumers and safeguard their confidence.
Inclusion without Protection is Incomplete
Over the past decade, the expansion of digital financial services has helped drive meaningful progress toward the financial inclusion agenda, with global account ownership reaching 79 percent of adults in 2024 and mobile accounts playing a significant role. But as more consumers transact digitally, they are becoming increasingly exposed to fraud and scams, a problem growing at unprecedented rates alongside the rapid rise of AI and other technologies. In its 2025 Global State of Scams Report, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) found that seven in ten adults globally encountered a scam in the past year, and 13 percent encountered one at least once a day.
Scam prevalence is highest precisely in the regions where large consumer segments have been newly added into digital financial services, at 72 percent in South America and 68 percent in Africa. For newly included consumers, trust is particularly fragile. For a first-time user of digital financial services, a single adverse experience with fraud can be sufficient to undo trust in the system altogether, reversing years of progress toward inclusion in a single transaction.
In March 2026, CFI conducted a series of stakeholder interviews to understand how this threat is experienced across the financial inclusion sector, particularly for financial services providers and financial inclusion clients. The interviews showed that fraud and scams affect clients across the financial inclusion landscape regardless of whether incidents are formally reported. These threats occur across both digital and non-digital channels, often surfacing through third-party platforms such as social media and messaging applications — channels and interfaces that lie outside traditional financial regulation mandates but ultimately have a financial impact on people’s lives. The growing use of smartphones and digital channels increases exposure to identity theft, phishing attacks, AI-enabled impersonation, and other predatory attacks.
Why It’s Important to Adopt an Inclusion Lens
Whereas fraud and scams may target any consumer, financial inclusion clients face a lower likelihood of recovering lost funds and experience a disproportionate overall impact. When low-income consumers lose money to fraud, that loss typically represents a far larger share of total income than an equivalent loss would for a wealthier consumer. Evidence indicates that inadequate redress mechanisms, combined with these losses, can push vulnerable households toward damaging coping strategies, including taking on new debt to repay existing loans or reducing food consumption.
There is a clear financial health dimension to this problem. Financial stress increases susceptibility to promises of quick money, and it increases vulnerability to being unknowingly drawn into scam operations, a growing problem that intersects directly with human trafficking and transnational organized crime.
Beyond the financial toll, the experience of fraud or being scammed carries significant emotional weight, frequently compounded by shame that discourages reporting and erodes confidence in use of digital financial services altogether. Further, the absence of victim-centric approaches to tackle recourse, redress, and justice can drive victims back into becoming perpetrators of crime through human trafficking.
Meanwhile, financial service providers face their own set of risks, including fraudulent payments, identity theft, and direct intrusion into their systems by increasingly capable actors. While individual losses experienced by financial inclusion clients may appear modest at the transaction level, in aggregate they represent meaningful cost and exposure for institutions. Furthermore, when clients experience fraud or a scam, this can erode trust and confidence in financial institutions, leading to usage drop-off.
Technology-Led Innovation Brings Challenges but Also Hope
For over a decade now, innovation has centered around closing the access gap. However, we have an opportunity to use technology to close the consumer protection gap. As fraud and scams become driven by technology, solutions to close the gap are beginning to emerge. One of the fastest-moving areas aimed at addressing AI-generated impersonation is ‘liveness detection’, aimed at analyzing physiological cues that are difficult for attackers to fake, and that help stop deepfakes. Unlike previous liveness checks that required people to turn their heads, smile or blink into a camera, current liveness detection spots subtle indicators like skin texture, blood flow under the skin, and natural lighting. Iris scanners, for instance, can evaluate pupil dilation in response to changing light conditions, which is a uniquely human characteristic and hard to replicate with a digital overlay.
Scam signal is a real-time deployment for voice-based scam detection. Developed with FICO and deployed by Barclays and other banks, Scam Signal analyzes live telephony data during transactions to identify social engineering patterns in real time and claims to have shown a 30 percent improvement in scam detection rates, especially in authorized push payment fraud.
Recognizing that it is important to work together, financial institutions are also beginning to pool fraud signals and are using consortium analytics to improve fraud detection. Although this is at an early stage, it holds promise with the investments we have already made in digital public infrastructure globally.
Strengthening Recourse: Insights from Inoculation Theory
Conversations around fraud and scams tend to stop with providing warnings and consumer education or designing systems that reduce financial institutions’ liabilities. However, an often-ignored part of the consumer protection journey is strong redress. Inoculation theory might offer an insight into why designing strong redress is crucial to have positive consumer impact. The basic idea of inoculation theory is that people develop greater resistance when they are exposed to a weakened form of an infection or risk, along with a way that helps them recognize and counter it. Extrapolated to the world of financial services, we can argue that encountering fraud and scams is inevitable. However, simulating these for vulnerable segments, and redesigning redress systems appropriately so they are stronger and offer adequate and timely response to the affected users, can actually help build greater trust in financial systems. This is an area of ongoing research exploration at the Center for Financial Inclusion.
A New Track: Why This Topic Belongs on the Financial Inclusion Week Agenda
For the first time, Financial Inclusion Week will feature a dedicated track on fraud and scams, reflecting the reality that this issue touches every actor across the inclusive finance ecosystem, from clients to providers to regulators, and requires greater coordination and collective systematic action. The track will include a keynote address by Jorij Abraham, Managing Director of the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) where CFI is a foundation member, and will include sessions presenting current research and emerging solutions showcased by the PROTECT initiative, alongside an interactive session inviting participants to test their own knowledge of digital finance scams.
Fraud and scams are not a peripheral concern for financial inclusion. They are an increasingly urgent challenge that demands rapid adaptation, breaking silos, and embracing new ways to collaborate across sectors and borders. This is why this topic will feature as a new track at FIW, where it will complement a week of conversations around inclusive innovation. We invite you to join the conversation.
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