Royal Bank of Canada is developing tools by combining new and old tech to fight scams powered by gen AI. 

The bank is blending AI and gen AI tech to fight fraud, Geoffrey Morton, senior director of fraud strategy at RBC, told FinAi News. 

“We’re exploring specifically within scams,” Morton said. “It’s one thing to be able to detect the scam activity but it’s another problem to convince the client that they are part of a scam.” 

In financial services, this is called “breaking the spell,” Morton said. The bank reaches out to clients via their preferred method of communication — text message, email or automated call — to convince them not to complete the transaction because they are being scammed. 

“You may use the classical AI to drive the detection but might need gen AI capabilities to convince consumers to stop,” he said. 

The $1.1 trillion bank expects to launch the tool in 2026 after beta testing, Morton said. The bank declined to disclose the fraud-fighting service provider it is working with.  

The Toronto-based bank works with Nvidia to make its wealth management teams more efficient, it previously told FinAi News.  

American Express, which also works with Nvidia to track fraud in real time, and has managed to reduce false positives by nearly 6%, according to previous FinAi News reporting.  

Rising fraud, new tools 

RBC has seen a material impact by using traditional AI to catch fraud for years, Morton said.  

“We are adding new tools to our fraud-fighting toolbox as gen AI gives fraudsters the ability to improve the quality of scams they conduct,” he said. 

Eight in 10 Canadians think scams will be worse this holiday season, and 76% believe that they will be harder to detect, according to RBC’s Fraud Awareness Poll, published on Nov. 25. 

With the advent of gen AI, scams are not only becoming higher quality, but fraudsters are also able to personalize the scams at a scale that they couldn’t before, Morton said. 

“You are not seeing emails with spelling mistakes or grammatical errors anymore,” he said. “You’re getting really high-quality content, which is personalized.” 

Security companies are seeing a growing ecosystem of “fraud-as-a-service” cropping up on the internet, Morton said. 

“There’s AI tools baked into every part of the fraud supply chain,” he said. “Fraudsters are able to collect sensitive information by creating a fake website, stealing card credentials and auctioning it to the highest bidder on the dark web.” 

Tech companies such as Oracle are observing a similar trend and are keeping close tabs on how scams are evolving on the dark web so that they can develop tools to reduce financial fraud, according to FinAi News’ prior reporting.  

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