Citizens fights check fraud with AI, consumer education

Citizens Bank is helping businesses transition to digital payments and using AI and consumer education to fight check fraud.

Ninety-one percent of businesses in the U.S. still use paper checks, according to the 2025 Association for Financial Professionals ’ Payments Fraud and Control Survey, published on April 2, which surveyed more than 500 accountants and treasury managers.

[caption id="attachment_57379244" align="alignright" width="300"] (AI-generated)[/caption] I n fact, in 2025, 55% of SMBs — with revenue between $5 million and $50 million — reported they were affected by fraud, compared with 40% of large enterprises, with revenue between $50 million and $1 billion, according to the Citizens Bank 2025 Payments Trend report. The report surveyed 315 business leaders including chief financial officers and treasurers in March.

“Smaller businesses mainly just lack the resources to build out a more sophisticated infrastructure around fraud protection,” Mark Valentino , president of business banking at Citizens, said during a June 25 webinar presenting the report.

Leaving checks behind The $220 billion Citizens offers seminars to help business clients move away from paper checks and toward digital payment adoption, Valentino said. “Electronic transactions are definitely safer” as they are more automated and touch fewer hands, he said.

Citizens has also deployed AI in its back-end operations to screen transactions and flag suspicious activity during the transition from checks to digital payments, he said.

By deploying AI and educating businesses, Citizens Bank has seen check fraud drop to 53% in 2025 compared to 59% in 2024 by the survey respondents, the report said.

However, “checks are 16 times more likely to be subject to fraud attacks than digital payments,” Valentino said.

Larger bank customers generally have “an IT department that is heavily focused on fraud protection and still sometimes fraud gets penetrated with more sophisticated fraud attacks [done with AI].”

Move toward digital Similar to Citizens Bank, fintechs like BillGO are also reducing check related fraud by taking check payments to other digital payment channels.

Bill payments company BillGO , offers payments routing system that allows small businesses to sidestep physical checks, Dan Holt , co-founder and chief executive at BillGO, told Bank Automation News .

Nearly 100% of the businesses BillGO works with have been affected by fraud, Holt said. That’s why small businesses are willing to “pay for getting the money faster and guaranteed.”

BillGO, founded in 2015, moves $3 billion annually, he said.

However, nearly 52% of contractors still prefer to accept payments via check for ease of access and acceptability, according to the Citizens report.

The Trump administration plans to phase out check payments from the federal government system by Sept. 30, citing the high cost of running check infrastructure and high fraud-related activities associated with the financial instrument.

FIs need to protect businesses from check related fraud for as long as the financial instrument is being used, Valentino said, adding that slow pivot to digital payments like ACH and real time payments can cut check fraud dramatically.

Register here for “Seamless integration: The new frontier in embedded payments,” a free Bank Automation News webinar set for Tuesday, July 22, at 11 a.m. ET.

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Citizens fights check fraud with AI, consumer education

Paper checks still vital to 91% of SMBs

15 questions FI leaders ask about agentic AI

4 companies tap U.S. Bank for embedded payments

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