Roundtable round-up: fincrime leaders’ vision of a collaborative future

Financial crime is evolving. It feels like, despite the best efforts of fincrime fighters everywhere, the typical approach to stopping criminals is no longer effective enough to confidently protect customers.

Over the past few months, we’ve been hosting roundtable dinners with senior financial crime professionals at banks and fintechs to explore the urgent need for a new model.

The overall message was clear: practical, real-time collaboration is not just desirable. It’s now essential.

Experts who joined us described a thriving “fraud-as-a-service” economy, where criminal groups offer ready-made scams, scripts, and even customer support to budding fraudsters.

Tackling this requires coordination and speed from financial institutions that siloed approaches can’t match.

By securely sharing intelligence at the earliest signs of suspicion, financial institutions can recover stolen funds, disrupt criminal operations, and ultimately reduce fraud losses. But achieving this requires a profound shift in mindset, trust, and technology. Let’s take a closer look.

The challenge: fragmented defences and outdated mindsets

Despite growing public concern about fraud, these dinnertime discussions showed that many financial institutions still have an outdated mindset. Fraud losses are often seen as an unavoidable expense, rather than something that can be actively prevented.

“Fraud has become so embedded that many institutions simply treat it as a cost of doing business,” said one senior leader. “But accepting losses isn’t sustainable when criminal networks are moving faster, smarter, and at an industrial scale.”

Making matters worse is how fragmented the industry’s response is. While criminals collaborate freely across regions, financial institutions hesitate to share information, paralysed by fears of breaching privacy laws or competitive sensitivities.

“While criminals collaborate across borders without hesitation, financial institutions are still stuck behind legal fears and siloed thinking,” observed one attendee from a major bank. “The longer we hesitate, the greater the advantage for the attackers.”

These institutional barriers are reinforced by technical challenges. Real-time payment systems, now common worldwide, enable fraudsters to move funds within seconds, far outpacing the slower mechanisms of fraud detection, investigation, and asset recovery. As one expert pointed out, once a payment has been split across multiple accounts, cashed out, or funnelled through crypto exchanges, “recovery becomes almost impossible.”

Building a smarter response

The good news is that it’s not all bad: there are effective, proven ways to fight back.

It starts with early, real-time collaboration between institutions. This collaboration is based on intelligence, such as red flags and suspicion-based alerts, that are shared securely through compliant channels.

Platforms like Salv Bridge enable financial institutions to share this crucial insight between one another, significantly improving response times to recover stolen funds (investigations are regularly concluded in a day or two).

“Speed matters. If we wait until fraud is confirmed, the money is gone,” warned one expert. “Early, suspicion-based collaboration can make the difference between recovering funds and writing off another loss.”

Trust is as important as technology. Several participants noted that open dialogue, structured partnerships, and shared governance frameworks help overcome competitive tensions.

As familiarity with secure information exchange grows, institutions become more willing to exchange insights that, collectively, strengthen the entire financial system’s resilience.

In cases of authorised push payment (APP) fraud, for example, early warnings shared between sending and receiving institutions have enabled accounts to be frozen before funds are dispersed through mule networks. Structured collaboration has also led to significant recoveries, attendees said, even across borders, when institutions act within minutes rather than waiting for full legal confirmation.

Several participants observed that newer entrants to the financial services market are especially exposed to fraud risks under new reimbursement regimes. With thinner margins and less mature fraud controls, these organisations may find collaborative intelligence sharing even more beneficial.

Participants across each of our dinner events agreed that financial institutions need a stronger grip on the weaknesses that criminals exploit. For example, one participant described how one fintech had a customer who successfully onboarded by uploading a photograph of a sandwich instead of an identity document. This was spotted later during a review but, as the participant said, it should never have happened in the first place.

A turning point for financial crime

Experts pointed out that the industry needs to take a broader view of vulnerability. Criminals increasingly target financially vulnerable people, not just the young and inexperienced, turning victims into unwitting money launderers.

Intelligence-led collaboration offers a way to detect these patterns faster and intervene before greater harm occurs.

It feels like we’re at a real turning point.

The technology exists to enable better collaboration. We’ve proven its effectiveness with Salv Bridge. And though financial services firms can be concerned about what regulators will say about data sharing, the legal frameworks permit it.

What’s needed is the willingness to think and act differently in order to move from isolated defence to coordinated prevention.

“We’re realising that fighting back is possible. It’s not just about minimising losses after the fact,” said an exec from a global payments provider. “Recoveries can happen if we act faster, share smarter, and build trust across the system.”

Our work in facilitating secure, real-time collaboration between fincrime teams proves that a new model is achievable. By connecting organisations and building confidence in compliant intelligence sharing methods, we’re moving the industry from acceptance to active prevention.

As financial crime keeps evolving, institutions face a choice: remain reactive, treating fraud losses as an unavoidable line item, or embrace collaboration as a strategic imperative. Those who choose the latter stand a much better chance of turning the tide.