More than 90 per cent of senior compliance experts in Ireland believe artificial intelligence (AI) is being used by organised crime groups to carry out financial fraud, a national survey has found.
Only 1 per cent of compliance professionals indicated they did not view AI as “a growing systemic risk to the Irish financial sector” at all, according to the Compliance Institute.
Its poll of more than 100 senior compliance experts found 70 per cent believed organised crime groups’ use of AI to conduct financial crime was “significantly increasing”, while 22 per cent thought it is “somewhat increasing”.
Just 8 per cent indicated they had seen “no noticeable change” or evidence of AI use in financial crimes, the survey found.
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Examples such as deepfakes, synthetic identities and AI-generated phishing scams were pointed to throughout the questionnaire.
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The findings demonstrated “just how significant a threat AI-driven financial crime has become to the Irish financial services sector”, Compliance Institute chief executive Michael Kavanagh said.
“The growing use of AI to perpetrate crimes means the potential for damage for financial crimes is rapidly increasing.
“Criminals don’t need to be technically sophisticated themselves any more, because AI tools can do the heavy lifting in that regard.
“Fraudsters are using AI to clone voices, generate convincing videos and build entire fake identities in order to trick people into handing over their money or personal information.
“What makes AI-driven fraud so dangerous is how convincing it has become and how much more difficult it is now for people to recognise scams.”
In the survey, 93 per cent of compliance experts said they saw “AI-related risks”, such as AI-driven cyber threats, as “a growing systemic risk to the Irish financial sector as a whole, rather than just a risk to individual firms”.
Only 2 per cent believed there was “no significant impact”, while 4 per cent said it was “a risk to individual firms only”.
“Firms need to understand exactly where their dependencies lie and have a plan for when a provider fails,” Kavanagh said.
“When many firms rely on the same small number of AI and technology providers, a single outage, error or cyberattack doesn’t stay with one firm. It can spread across the sector very quickly.
“Ireland is home to the European operations of many of the world’s largest technology and cloud companies, so this risk is especially relevant here.”
The Central Bank of Ireland found almost €180 million was reported as stolen in financial frauds last year, a 27 per cent increase in value on 2024’s figure.
