Jakarta. As digital payments accelerate, banks face a growing dilemma: how to stop fraudulent transfers without slowing legitimate transactions. The issue was among those raised by industry experts discussing the future of payments at Standard Chartered Indonesia’s Treasury Leadership Forum 2026 in Jakarta.

“Clients want both,” said Jasan Manghnani, Cluster Head of Digital Channels Solutions for ASEAN at Standard Chartered. “We want faster payments, instant payments, but we also want to balance security and convenience.”

Rather than imposing additional checks on every transaction, banks need to make security measures more targeted, identifying unusual activity such as payments to newly added beneficiaries without creating unnecessary obstacles for customers.

“The opportunity, I would say, is to make security much more intelligent and contextual,” Jasan said.

He warned that fraudsters were increasingly exploiting human behavior, using techniques such as business email compromise, social engineering and deepfake videos. Banks and corporate clients must therefore share responsibility for preventing fraud, including by strengthening internal procedures, exchanging information and educating employees.

Sean Letz, Asia Cyber Leader at Marsh McLennan, said real-time monitoring and targeted transaction checks remained essential to fraud prevention.

“You need really good data to understand what it is that you should be monitoring in the first place and what is anomalous and what is not anomalous,” Sean said.

Additional verification should be tailored to the level of risk, giving customers time to reconsider suspicious transfers without making routine payments unnecessarily difficult.

“It doesn’t always have to be, again, overly onerous friction, but it needs to be smartly tailored,” he said.

Bank Indonesia targets payment-system risks
The challenge also faces Bank Indonesia as it seeks to strengthen the country’s digital payment ecosystem.

Ryan Rizaldy, Executive Director and Head of Payments System Policy at Bank Indonesia, said payment fraud had become a major concern as digital transactions expanded.

“Almost every day I hear about the news of fraud and anything,” Ryan said.

The central bank is working to improve payment infrastructure and data-sharing capabilities to help providers identify and prevent fraudulent transactions. It has also introduced TIKMI, a framework covering transactions, interconnection, competence, risk management and infrastructure to assess payment providers’ capabilities and identify areas for improvement.

However, Ryan said risks extended to third-party technology vendors, some of which lacked common standards. Personnel at certain payment providers also needed stronger capabilities to manage risks associated with new technologies.

“Somehow they just give it away, all the responsibility to the third-party provider without any awareness of risk mitigation,” he said.

Bank Indonesia is working with the Indonesian Payment System Association and industry players to improve risk management, Rizaldy said, describing the effort as a work in progress.

As digital payments become faster, the challenge for banks and regulators is to identify fraudulent transactions before the money is gone, without adding unnecessary delays for legitimate customers.

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