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Greater transparency in buy now, pay later activity is key to helping consumers build their credit histories and supporting responsible lending.Scott Brown, Group President, Financial Services Affirm plans to report all pay-over-time loan products issued from April 1, 2025, and beyond, including Pay-in-4. The move will help drive greater transparency into the buy now, pay later market while helping consumers build their credit histories over time. Related Posts

Every year, I look forward to sharing Experian’s Future of Fraud Forecast because it’s more than just a report —  it serves as a trusted guide for the industry and a way to cut through the noise to spotlight the trends that will matter most over the next year. Fraud isn’t just a business problem. It’s also a human problem that impacts real people. Every time we stop fraudsters, we protect people’s identities, their financial security, and their trust in the digital world. That’s the mission that drives me. As we head into 2026, the fraud landscape is evolving in ways we couldn’t have predicted 20 years ago. We’re entering an era where AI is making fraud more sophisticated, autonomous and scalable than it was even just 12 months ago. For example, agentic AI can help book a vacation with just a single prompt. Meanwhile, tried and true schemes that have been around for years are still happening and are being accelerated by AI. This isn’t science fiction, it’s happening now and requires modern fraud mitigation strategies to combat. If we fail to act, businesses and consumers will face risks that are harder to detect and easier to exploit, leaving millions vulnerable. This year, our forecast highlights five fraud threats including: Machine-to-machine mayhem: As organizations race to leverage agentic AI, the sheer volume of players entering the space will make fraud inevitable and impossible to ignore. Fraudsters will exploit agentic AI to commit new levels of digital fraud. With machine-to-machine interactions initiating transactions without clear ownership of liability, businesses will face growing uncertainty around agent ownership, intent and risk. Experian predicts fraud will reach a tipping point that will spark major conversations and decisions around liability, regulation and the role of agentic AI in shaping responsible digital commerce. Deepfakes outsmart HR: Employment fraud is set to escalate in the remote workforce as generative AI (GenAI) tools generate hyper-tailored resumes and deepfake candidates capable of passing interviews in real time. Experian forecasts that employers will unknowingly onboard individuals on a much larger scale who aren’t who they say they are, giving bad actors access to sensitive systems. This emerging threat is expected to reshape how organizations verify identity and intent in the hiring process. Smarter homes, scarier threats: Smart homes are introducing new entry points for fraud. Devices like virtual assistants, smart locks, security systems, smart appliances and the coming use of humanoid robots will be exploited by bad actors to access personal data, monitor household activity and even take control of physical access points. Experian predicts that as the adoption of smart home devices continues to grow, so will the risk, with new forms of ransomware and opportunities for account hijacking, turning convenience into vulnerability for consumers. Website cloning will overwhelm fraud teams: Cloned websites, where fraudsters replicate legitimate sites to phish consumers, are becoming easier to create through AI tools and harder to eliminate. Notably, even after takedown requests, spoofed domains continue to resurface. As companies are forced to play whack-a-mole to address these threats, they risk being distracted from broader fraud strategies, allowing other threats to escalate. Experian forecasts that cloned sites will continue to cause significant losses for online retailers and businesses by tricking consumers into sharing their credentials, fueling credit card fraud, accelerating identity theft and synthetic identities, and facilitating other forms of financial fraud. Bots will break hearts and bank accounts: Emotionally intelligent bots powered by GenAI will accelerate the scale of their complex scams, like romance fraud and relative-in-need scams, without a human behind the keyboard. These bots will respond convincingly, build trust over time, and manipulate victims with precision and emotion. As they become harder to distinguish from real people and good bots, Experian predicts fraud will scale faster and become more financially and psychologically damaging. Fraud is becoming more adaptive, autonomous, and intelligent. But the good news is we can fight back. At Experian, we’re committed to helping businesses outpace these threats by combining differentiated data, advanced analytics, and AI-powered technology. Together, we can protect consumers without sacrificing experience and make a real difference in people’s lives. Learn more about Experian’s fraud prevention solutions here.

Chief Innovation Officer, Kathleen Peters recently spoke on an “AI at Velocity: Securing the Agentic Enterprise” panel at Fortune Brainstorm AI, exploring strategies for designing, deploying, and securing agents to ensure observability and control from day one.  The panel covered a core theme that underscores how to accelerate enterprise adoption of AI agents: promoting trust. The discussion explored different dimensions of trust in AI agents, all of which speak to strengths of Experian. First, Kathleen cited the critical need to know the intent behind an agent, verifying whether it is acting on behalf of a human, another agent, or a bad actor. Also, understanding the permissions that the agent has been given is very important. Here, Experian’s identify protection and fraud prevention solutions play a key role.   Second, trust is built through policy guardrails that enterprises put in place that provide a framework for its network operations across the governance, orchestration, and execution layers. Ensuring proper security of agentic processes becomes the top priority for businesses and consumers who engage with the enterprise. This security is especially important in highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare.  These policy guardrails will serve two purposes: differentiate a brand’s customer experience and eventually become the foundation for industry-wide regulatory standards. These guardrails need to be enforced by a policy engine that should have the capability to remediate or reverse the action of an AI agent if its actions violate any policy.  Experian Ascend Platform’s feature set includes this kind of governance and orchestration of agentic-AI processes to ensure the highest standards of data privacy and protection, and keep our customers safe and secure.  The panel closed with a look-ahead to 2026 and beyond. Kathleen emphasized that agents will quickly move beyond automation of human tasks into new areas where they will “talk” to each other and even spawn new agents. In this fast-evolving landscape, building trust through enterprise policy and proper orchestration and governance of AI agents will separate the market winners from the rest.  Watch the virtual event here.