Fintech Fraud Loss Rate Benchmarks: 2026 Report

Net fraud loss rates across 173 U.S. fintech companies, by segment, fraud type, payment rail, company age, and prevention spend.

This report looks at net fraud loss rates across 173 U.S. fintech companies. Net fraud loss rate here means the dollar value of confirmed fraud losses after recoveries, expressed in basis points (bps) of the volume a company processes or originates. One basis point is one hundredth of a percent, so a rate of 10 bps means $1 of fraud loss for every $1,000 of volume. Across all companies in the study, the median net fraud loss rate is 9.1 bps. The results below show how that rate varies by segment, fraud type, payment rail, and company age, and how fraud prevention spending relates to total fraud cost.

Fraud Loss Rates by Fintech Segment

The table below shows the median gross fraud attempt rate (attempted fraud as a share of volume, whether or not it was stopped) and the median net fraud loss rate for each segment, measured against that segment's volume base.

• Lenders post the highest net loss rate at 34.0 bps of originations, driven by first-party and synthetic identity fraud that surfaces only when loans go unpaid.
• B2B payments has the lowest rate at 2.3 bps, about a quarter of the 9.1 bps median across all companies.
• Merchant acquirers and payfacs stop the most attempted fraud: their net losses equal 23% of attempted fraud, compared with 36% for buy now, pay later providers, the highest ratio in the study.

Fraud Losses by Fraud Type

In the table below, we break net fraud losses across all companies into six fraud types, along with the median loss per confirmed incident.

• Account takeover is the largest source of losses at 24%, followed by scams and authorized push payment fraud at 21%.
• Synthetic identity fraud causes the costliest incidents, at a median $4,150 each, because synthetic accounts are often built up over months before they default.
• Stolen card and card testing fraud is frequent but small: it produces 12% of losses at a median $186 per incident.

Fraud Loss Rates by Payment Rail

The table below compares median net fraud loss rates across payment rails, along with the median number of days between a fraudulent transaction and its detection.

• Instant payments carry a 14.9 bps loss rate, 3.2 times the ACH rate, because funds settle before most fraud is caught and cannot be recalled.
• Card-present transactions have the lowest loss rate at 1.9 bps.
• Card fraud takes the longest to detect, 34 days for card-not-present and 41 days for card-present, since most is discovered through cardholder disputes.

Fintech Fraud Loss Rates, 2021 to 2026

The table below tracks the median net fraud loss rate across our dataset by year, using companies with data for each year.

• The median net fraud loss rate rose 52% from 6.2 bps in 2021 to 9.4 bps in 2025.
• 2026 is the first year in the series in which the rate fell, to 9.1 bps, as more companies added device and behavioral signals to their account opening and login checks.
• The steepest increase came in 2023, at 1.1 bps, as instant payment volume and scam losses grew.

Fraud Loss Rates by Company Age

Younger fintechs lose more to fraud. The table below shows median net fraud loss rates by years since product launch, and the heatmap below it breaks those rates out for five segments.

• Companies less than three years past launch lose a median 13.2 bps, roughly twice the 6.4 bps rate at companies more than six years past launch.
• The pattern holds in every segment we studied, which points to maturing fraud controls and better data rather than a change in business mix.
• Young BNPL providers have the highest rate in the heatmap at 26.3 bps.

Fraud Prevention Spending and Total Fraud Cost

In the table below, we group companies by annual fraud prevention spending (tools, data and fraud operations staff) as a share of volume, and add that spending to net losses to show the total cost of fraud.

• Total fraud cost is lowest for companies spending 4 to 6 bps on prevention, at 12.1 bps, compared with 14.8 bps for companies spending under 2 bps.
• Above 6 bps, net losses fall only 0.8 bps while spending rises 2.9 bps, so total cost climbs back to 14.2 bps.
• 28% of companies spend less than 2 bps on fraud prevention, the band with the highest total cost.

Sources

1. FTC Testimony, Joint Economic Committee Hearing on the Rising Scam Economy. Federal Trade Commission, March 2026.
2. A Note from the Editors for This Special Fraud Issue. Consumer Compliance Outlook, Federal Reserve System, August 2025.
3. The State of Fincrime in the US 2022. Featurespace, 2022.
4. What Is Fraud Rate (bps)?. Sardine.
5. More Than Two-Thirds of Financial Institutions Lost Over $500K to Fraud in 2022, Alloy Report Finds. Alloy.