In the past, the main feature of personal finance apps was convenience. The most effective products offered improved budgeting and saving, faster payments, or a better understanding of where the user’s money was going.
That definition is growing. Cybersecurity is no longer a silent feature of the product but is becoming an integral part of the customer-facing product as more and more financial activity is processed through mobile apps, open banking connections, and automated tools.
Fraud Prevention Is Becoming Part of Everyday Banking
This change is significant because of the magnitude of payment fraud. The data, from UK Finance, shows that payment fraud resulted in losses of approximately £1.28 billion in 2025, up 4% on 2024.
Losses from Authorized Push Payment fraud were £576.4 million, a 19% year-on-year increase. This type of scam is problematic because the victim is tricked into approving the payment, rather than a simple account compromise.
This alters consumer expectations of financial instruments. While a budgeting app that can pinpoint overspending is helpful, a product that can also detect unusual spending or alert users to suspicious payment patterns offers a more comprehensive level of financial security.
Security Providers Are Moving Closer to Personal Finance
Financial platforms are increasingly reliant on specialist security infrastructure that users may not even have direct access to. Partnering with a cyber security reseller can provide organizations with technologies spanning endpoint protection, identity management, threat detection, and secure access without the need to develop all of these security capabilities in-house.
That’s important because personal finance is becoming more intertwined. A stolen account can be useful even before money is taken from it: Savings apps, banking platforms, and account aggregation tools can provide information on salaries, regular payments, spending habits, and balances.
Moreover, the threat is no longer just traditional malware. According to UK Finance, there were 3.81 million unauthorized fraud cases in 2025, up 11%, and mobile banking fraud cases grew 21%.
Security must thus safeguard the financial system and the individual using it. As crucial to the customer experience as charts that show monthly spending, is authentication and behavioural monitoring and quick account intervention.
Open Banking Makes Trust More Important
Open banking is an example of convenience and security. Users can link financial accounts to third-party apps without manually transferring data between services.
The fraud rates are relatively low in those payment journeys. In 2025, Open Banking Limited reported that about 1 in 6,000 open banking payments was fraudulent, whereas the wider payments industry saw about 1 in 2,500 payments be fraudulent.
However, the nature of the threat is changing. Over 66% of reported frauds were linked to APP fraud and providers have reported increasingly sophisticated phishing, smishing, impersonation and fake-refund frauds.
Protecting a database is therefore not the challenge. Financial products need to identify when a legitimate customer may be making a genuine payment for the wrong reasons.
Customer Support Is Becoming a Security Channel
Financial customer service is also changing in this way. Once a person feels they’ve been ripped off, speed can be as important as the technology itself.
For customer communications across channels, including voice, messaging, and digital support, a CCaaS provider (Customer Communications as a Service) can help. In personal finance, that infrastructure can be part of the security response, enabling organizations to swiftly direct suspicious payment inquiries and keep a record of customer interactions.
Moreover, this is especially relevant if scams are about urgency. Criminals might inform the victims that an account has been compromised or that funds must be moved quickly and the customer has little time to think about what they are being told.
Financial companies thus must have customer support staff that can respond fast enough to disrupt that process. The contact center is no longer just a venue for answering account inquiries but is now becoming a key part of fraud prevention.
Open Finance Will Increase the Amount of Data at Stake
As open banking evolves into open finance, cybersecurity may become even more critical. The FCA’s 2026 roadmap includes plans to increase secure data sharing, such as with savings, investments, mortgages and pensions.
That could provide consumers with a much more complete picture of their finances. It could also enable apps to provide more and more personalised suggestions based on information from multiple financial products.
The compromise is that higher valuable data will be flowing among more services. If consumers are to entrust platforms with more of their financial lives, strong permissions, authentication and monitoring will therefore be vital.
Security Is Becoming Part of the Value Proposition
While consumers might not select a finance app based on its cybersecurity architecture, they will soon leave one that they don’t trust. This makes protection more and more critical to product design, customer support and brand reputation.
Personal finance companies are shifting to a world where budgeting and saving go hand in hand with security. The best products will not just assist users in comprehending their funds once transactions are made.
They will provide increasing protection to those users as the money is in transit.
