AI Fraud Detection in Real-Time Payments: Architecting ML That Catches Attacks in Milliseconds
If you are building or operating a real-time payments platform in 2026, you already know that rules-based fraud detection is dead. Attackers use generative AI to produce thousands of synthetic identities per hour, payment rails like FedNow and SEPA Instant settle in under 10 seconds, and authorised push payment (APP) fraud alone cost UK consumers £460 million in 2025 according to UK Finance. The only way to keep up is machine learning operating at the wire — feature computation, model inference, and a decision returned before the payment completes. The modelling is the easy part. The hard part is building the infrastructure to serve those models at sub-100-millisecond latency, with features computed from streaming data, with rules and models running in the same decision pipeline, and with explainability that satisfies regulators. ...