Capco, a Wipro company, has found that Canadian consumers identify online data security, impersonation, and identity theft as leading payment fraud concerns.
A survey of 1.000 Canadian adults conducted by global management and technology consultancy Capco has found that 91% of respondents fear their online data could be used to facilitate impersonation or reveal answers to security questions. The findings, published in the company's new Canada Payment Fraud report, arrive as Canada prepares to introduce its Real-Time Rail (RTR), a system that will enable instant A2A payments.
Fraud types and consumer experience
According to the survey, card or card data theft (45%), identity theft (45%), and account takeover (41%) are the fraud types that most concern respondents. More than a third (36%) of those surveyed said they had been targeted by attempted payment fraud over the previous two years. Among this group, 37% noticed a purchase they had not made, 32% identified a phishing attempt, and 20% experienced attempted card or card data theft.
Other fraud types cited as concerns include unauthorised purchases (38%), phishing (27%), unauthorised transfer payments (24%), and impersonation or social engineering (17%).
Deepfake technology and institutional communication
Over three-quarters of respondents (78%) expressed concern about the impact of deepfake technology on voice biometrics and facial identification. Of these, 27% consider such authentication methods 'not entirely secure', 6% view them as already insecure, and 45% expect them to come under future threat.
Despite this concern, more than half of respondents (52%) said they had not received, or could not recall receiving, guidance from their financial institution on the deepfake threat. This proportion rose to 60% among respondents aged 55 to 65, compared with 48% of those aged 25 to 35.
Confidence in financial institutions remains relatively high overall, with 52% of respondents somewhat confident and 33% very confident that their primary financial institution would protect them from payment fraud.
When selecting a financial institution for payment services, security (60%) and fraud protection (46%) were the factors most frequently cited as important, ahead of customer service quality (39%), transaction speed (36%), and accessibility (36%). In addition, 40% respondents said security was their absolute priority, while 31% said they wanted security combined with reasonable convenience.
Complex passwords were cited as frustrating by 33% of respondents, while 27% said the same of security codes used in multi-factor authentication.
Industry implications
Capco's report links its findings to the broader context of Canada's move toward real-time payments and the growing use of artificial intelligence by fraudsters to scale attacks. The report outlines measures for financial institutions, including multilayered defences, improved coordination between internal teams, information sharing, detection gap analysis, and AI-enabled real-time detection tools. Capco has suggested that institutions revisit fraud prevention strategies across the customer lifecycle, from onboarding to dispute resolution, incorporating tools such as just-in-time messaging to deliver security guidance closer to the point of risk.
