The UK payments sector faces a dual challenge: soaring fraud losses and a talent shortage, demanding new skills, AI literacy, and global recruitment.
by Jack Robertson.
The UK faces a convergence of financial crime and skills shortages that threatens to overwhelm the payments sector. Fraud costs the UK economy £219 billion annually, with complaints hitting record quarterly levels in 2025. While general UK talent shortages have eased, financial services face acute pressure with job applications plummeting 57% for permanent roles year-on-year. An estimated 160,000 workers in financial services require upskilling, while 637,000 businesses lack basic cybersecurity skills needed to implement adequate security measures.
Anatomy of the shortage The talent crisis in payments has deep structural roots that extend far beyond simple recruitment challenges. Traditional educational approaches—some across the industry argue—are failing to meet the sector’s evolving needs, creating a fundamental mismatch between available skills and industry requirements. Eric Zie, CEO & founder of GoCodeGreen, identifies the core challenge: “The biggest challenge is ensuring learning keeps pace with real-world change.” This disconnect has become particularly acute in payments, where regulatory frameworks, technological capabilities, and threat landscapes evolve simultaneously.
The skills transformation is profound. “Technical skills have shifted from narrow coding proficiency to interdisciplinary fluency—combining software engineering, regulation, and product thinking,” explains Zie. Payment professionals now require expertise spanning compliance frameworks, artificial intelligence (AI) governance, and emerging regulatory requirements— capabilities that traditional training programmes simply don’t provide. The lag is most visible in risk and compliance, where traditional programmes cannot keep pace with emerging issues such as AI regulation, environmental impact, and digital ethics. Broader modelling shows that 30% of UK workers may need to change occupations by 2030, underscoring the scale of the digital skills gap that payments firms must address.
Forward-thinking organisations are recognising that traditional recruitment pools cannot meet evolving demands. The pandemic prompted many employers to start offshoring jobs, particularly techrelated ones, to address concerns about security and operational resilience, while older employees have been leaving the industry at higher rates than normal. As James Simcox, chief operations & product officer of Equals Money, explains: “We’ve started to look for lots of those roles outside the UK. In these markets, firms pay slightly better, and we need a 24/7 workforce for fraud monitoring anyway.” This international shift reflects both necessity and opportunity. Continuous monitoring across time zones has become essential to tackling modern financial crime, while overseas talent also brings different perspectives on fraud patterns, regulatory approaches, and risk assessment methodologies that strengthen overall defences. The strategic risk implications are significant. Diversity enables teams to spot problems earlier, solve them more effectively, and innovate in a way that outpaces bad actors, Simcox adds. “Lots of small actions individually might not trigger any fraud alerts, but you get it from multiple sources that things seem wrong—that’s where the human piece really comes in,” notes Simcox. “That instinct for something being ‘off’ is often spot on in compliance.”
The industry faces a fundamental skills transition, with firms warning that traditional training has not kept pace with the tactics of modern fraudsters: “We haven’t been trained to deal with fraudsters who can impersonate a customer’s voice, their email style, or spin up a copy of your website in four seconds,” explains Simcox. This evolution demands both technical capabilities and nuanced judgement—a combination that benefits from diverse thinking styles and backgrounds. Organisations that limit their talent pool to traditional demographics risk missing critical perspectives needed to combat increasingly sophisticated threats. The future workforce will require fewer but more highly skilled analysts. Simcox predicts: “The talent shortage will probably become less of a problem because we need fewer people, but the sort of person we need will be very different. It’ll still be the same problem anyway—just more sophisticated”
AI has rapidly become both a salvation and a source of complexity for payments firms. At the same time, the sector is bracing for the loss of senior expertise through retirement by 2035, forcing firms to compete with technology companies for scarce data and engineering talent.
“AI adoption is accelerating rapidly across the sector, with 85% of digital-first payment firms now reporting live AI integration, particularly in fraud analytics and real-time risk scoring,’ says Willem Wellinghoff, chief compliance officer and UK chair at Ecommpay. “However, this rapid deployment has created an urgent need for upskilling to manage these systems effectively.”
The adoption also creates governance challenges as regulatory frameworks struggle to keep pace. “The balancing act between traditional risk expertise and digital innovation skills is critical,” Wellinghoff explains. His firm invests in hybrid training approaches that combine compliance knowledge with AI literacy, creating roles that bridge technical and regulatory functions. To reinforce this, Ecommpay runs ongoing professional development programmes and knowledge-sharing sessions to ensure employees remain ahead of regulatory and technological change.
Automation is reshaping workforce needs in payments, creating demand for highly specialised roles that blend technical depth with risk management expertise.
Chirag Patel, chief information security officer at Bottomline, says his firm has not faced major hiring difficulties overall, but certain skills remain scarce. “The one area where we do see gaps is roles like threat hunting, security engineering focused on AI, and automation of security services,” he notes.
The one area where we do see gaps is roles like threat hunting, security engineering focused on AI, and automation of security services.
Geographic flexibility has become a crucial competitive advantage. “As a global organisation, we are fortunate to have a broad footprint that allows us to tap into diverse talent pools across regions,” explains Patel. “Additionally, our support for remote and hybrid work has been a significant differentiator, enabling us to attract top talent regardless of geography.”
Patel adds that the future workforce will increasingly require both subject matter experience and strong AI engineering skills. To prepare, Bottomline has launched an AI governance programme to build responsible-use awareness across the business and is partnering with universities and cybersecurity bootcamps to create early-career pathways.
Rising UK fraud losses are colliding with a shrinking talent pipeline, leaving payments firms exposed at precisely the moment when AI-enabled attacks demand stronger defences. Application volumes for permanent roles are falling, while essential technical and compliance skills remain scarce. For risk leaders, this presents both opportunity and urgency. International recruitment enables 24/7 monitoring while bringing diverse perspectives on evolving threat patterns. Cognitive diversity within teams improves detection, speeds problem-solving, and supports innovation that can keep pace with increasingly sophisticated criminals. Firms that cling to traditional recruitment pools risk being outmanoeuvred. Those that adapt—by expanding talent pipelines, investing in AI literacy, and building continuous professional development—will be best placed to safeguard resilience and capture competitive advantage in the decade ahead.
The rapid growth of AI is an area where the sector needs to upskill rapidly.
