Fighting financial crime through coordinated collaboration, not isolation

New technology and compliance fears often collide. But financial crime doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s fast, coordinated, and increasingly spans platforms, countries, and institutions.

According to the Polish Bank Association, in 2024, criminals attempted to extort loans worth 324.2 million PLN (€75m) through credit fraud in Poland. And it’s a similar story across Europe.

Fraud schemes involve multiple actors and rapid fund transfers as the stolen money moves through multiple institutions and countries. This makes them much harder to detect and stop when teams work in silos.

To keep up, financial institutions must share intelligence earlier through better collaboration. And not just rely on detection after the fact.

The collaboration gap in financial crime prevention

While fraudsters collaborate freely, many banks, fintechs, and crypto firms remain isolated in their response, often feeling stuck by legal uncertainty or organisational caution.

The real barrier to collaboration in financial crime prevention isn’t technology — it’s uncertainty. Legal ambiguity, operational risk, and outdated communication tools all slow progress.

The concern? That intelligence sharing between companies might breach regulatory boundaries, risk debanking good customers, or encourage tipping off.

There will always be arguments for why we shouldn’t modernise, stick with the status quo–and essentially surrender silently to criminals. But the reality is more optimistic.

At Salv, we’ve been building collaborative technology for fincrime intelligence for five years, working with over a hundred financial institutions and tens of regulators to navigate the legal complexities and obstacles.

We do this by avoiding traditional and broad data-sharing initiatives and instead enabling financial institutions to exchange real-time messages to share intelligence. Human intelligence is what’s needed to take immediate action.

Underpinning this is Salv’s industry standards for intelligence exchange that have been adopted in multiple markets, setting the legal and operational basis that platforms like Salv Bridge follow.

By exchanging only enough detail to assess suspicion and investigate further, institutions can intervene earlier, stop fraud faster, and protect their customers without overstepping data protection limits.

What is intelligence sharing in financial crime prevention?

Intelligence sharing in financial crime prevention refers to the structured, secure exchange of intelligence between financial institutions during the suspicion phase of fraud or money laundering.

Rather than working in isolation, banks, fintechs, and payment providers can coordinate across borders and sectors to notify each other when suspicious patterns are spotted, so together scams can be stopped, and more funds can be recovered.

A fragmented defence slows everyone down

Still, the challenges are real. Financial institutions operate within a complex web of regulations, from GDPR to banking secrecy laws. And even when fraud is suspected, many teams hesitate to escalate cases beyond their walls.

This results in a reactive model: the fraud happens, stolen money is moved well out of reach, and only then does the response begin.

As Dr. Grzegorz Hansen, Head of Cash Management Sales Bureau - Structured Transactions at BNP Paribas Bank Polska, put it in a LinkedIn article: “Banks, payment service providers and VASPs are not talking to each other as well, and as often as they could be.”

Even when informal coordination does happen, it often relies on insecure methods: phone calls, unencrypted emails, or undocumented workarounds. These carry significant compliance operational and reputational risks, and they lack the consistency and oversight required for true effectiveness.

Yes, collaboration in financial crime prevention is possible — and legal Contrary to popular belief, financial institutions can share relevant intelligence during suspected fraud events. Legally and safely. The legal foundation exists in EU data protection laws and domestic AML frameworks. What’s critical is proportionality and purpose limitation: only share what’s necessary to prevent financial crime, through secure, auditable means. This doesn’t mean customer profiles or transaction histories. It means red flags, suspicion triggers, and typologies. When both parties are already involved in the transaction, only details of suspicion need to be shared – and this kind of intelligence sharing is both lawful and operationally vital. Technology alone won’t solve this. Trust between institutions is just as important – especially when the fear of legal missteps outweighs the risk of inaction. This trust is made possible via mutually agreed standards, derived from the EU and domestic laws, plus the country-wide best practices. Take, for instance, a cross-border scam where an overseas bank flags a suspected mule account. With the right tools, policies and procedures in place, a domestic institution receiving that payment could act immediately, halting the movement of the funds without needing to wait for a crime reference number or a formal report.

Trust, technology, and collaboration in financial crime prevention

Technology alone won’t solve this. Trust between institutions is just as important – especially when the fear of legal missteps outweighs the risk of inaction.

Salv works on both fronts. To build trust and get people talking, we bring financial crime professionals together in countries like Estonia, Poland, Denmark and the UK. Creating a safe space for open conversation, shared concerns, and how to build trust. As relationships are formed, how financial institutions can collaborate in a more structured way becomes less daunting.

On the technology side, Salv Bridge acts as the platform to make it happen. Built specifically for financial crime intelligence sharing, it replaces insecure, ad hoc methods with encrypted, role-based, auditable communication, using agreed templates to ensure only the right information is shared, with the right people, for the right reasons. This makes it easier for compliance teams to act decisively without stepping outside regulatory boundaries.

As Dr. Hansen notes, moving beyond silos is not just beneficial, it’s essential: “It is in the interest of AML and CFT […] to convince all of these types of financial institutions to form common, cross-sectoral Partnerships rather than ‘silo’ Partnerships, of much lower value.”

From caution to confidence

The legal frameworks are in place. The technology is proven. What’s needed now is a mindset shift from caution to coordination.

Financial crime will keep evolving, and financial institutions are better equipped if they tackle it together. Structured, suspicion-based collaboration in financial crime prevention improves fraud recovery rates, accelerates response times, and helps protect more customers from harm.

People, organisations and legislators are all talking about collaboration and what happens next. Our technology has been tested and used for years by hundreds of companies across Europe.

It’s time to break the silence. What’s stopping you from sharing intelligence to beat financial crime?