Financial crime intelligence sharing has emerged as a defining challenge for the payments industry as real-time transactions become the norm.
Money now moves in seconds, but the mechanisms used to detect, investigate and respond to fraud often remain slow and fragmented, claims Salv.
This growing imbalance was the focus of the Joining the Dots: Breaking the Fraud Chain webinar, which examined how structured, real-time intelligence sharing could help financial institutions close critical response gaps.
For the company’s CEO and co-founder Taavi Tamkivi, the discussion landed at a pivotal moment. The webinar coincided with European institutions reaching agreement on the new Payment Services Regulation, which introduces reimbursement liability for fraud victims and formalises intelligence-sharing obligations across the financial services sector. Together, these changes raise the stakes for firms that fail to act quickly and collaboratively.
Tamkivi opened with a stark assessment of today’s threat landscape. Fraud typologies now spread with unprecedented speed, as criminal groups replicate successful scams across borders with near franchise-like efficiency. While criminals operate as coordinated networks, institutions still tend to tackle fraud in isolation, with each organisation seeing only a fragment of the wider picture.
He described a “fraud chain” that links multiple institutions. Large retail banks often sit at the start, holding accounts for victims who are persuaded to send payments instantly. Funds then move into mule accounts held at smaller banks or FinTechs, before being pushed offshore through remittance providers, global payment platforms or crypto exchanges. By the time the victim realises something is wrong, criminals may already have cashed out.
Beyond traditional banking, real-time consumer lenders can unintentionally accelerate losses. Victims sometimes take out loans to send additional funds, compounding the financial harm. The result is a fast-moving, layered and highly adaptive structure designed to exploit delays and blind spots between institutions.
That reality was reinforced by Toma Bingeliene, AML team lead at Paysera, who offered a frontline perspective. She highlighted investment fraud as a dominant threat, with victims lured by polished platforms, persuasive phone calls and fake dashboards showing imaginary returns. Smaller initial investments are followed by escalating transfers until the funds disappear entirely.
She also pointed to the rise of fake job schemes circulating on social media. Participants are promised payment for simple tasks and receive small sums as proof, before being drawn into groups where they are encouraged to deposit money to unlock larger rewards. In practice, victims end up paying each other while fraudsters skim the proceeds.
Paysera often finds itself in the middle of the fraud chain, processing transactions that originate from victims or pass through mule accounts. Instant payments intensify the pressure, with funds credited in under a minute. As Bingeliene put it, “If I have a question, I need the answer now, especially if we are talking about freezing money,” underscoring how narrow the intervention window has become.
Polling during the webinar revealed widespread frustration with slow, manual collaboration. Many institutions still rely on emails, phone calls, messaging apps or bespoke Swift messages to coordinate, methods that are undocumented, unpredictable and ill-suited to live fraud scenarios.
Tamkivi outlined two practical models for breaking the chain. The first is real-time request-for-information exchange, where a fraud alert at one institution immediately notifies the next, enabling funds to be frozen before they move on. The second is suspicious entity pooling, where encrypted identifiers such as IBANs, wallets and mule accounts are shared so members can screen activity proactively. With shared standards, automation and training, he argued, institutions could recover more than 50% of fraud proceeds.
Regulation is now reinforcing this direction. Alongside the Payment Services Regulation, the AML Regulation’s Article 75 formalises intelligence sharing in money laundering cases, while instant payment mandates and ISO 20022 will further reshape how institutions communicate. Taken together, these changes point to a future where speed, structure and collaboration are no longer optional.
Fraud is a networked problem, the speakers concluded, and only networked responses will be effective. Building trusted, real-time intelligence networks may be the industry’s most powerful tool in breaking the fraud chain.
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