A decade ago, the notion of regulated financial institutions exchanging crime intelligence in real time felt far-fetched. Legal barriers loomed large, trust between banks was almost non-existent, and what little collaboration took place happened at conferences, in working groups, or through informal personal networks — if at all.
According to Salv, the landscape has changed considerably. Regulators are now mandating cross-institution intelligence sharing from 2027 onwards, and platforms like Salv Bridge — live for four years — are demonstrating that nationwide and cross-border data sharing is not only possible but scalable.
What was once a niche technical debate is fast becoming a cornerstone of financial crime strategy.
To trace that journey, criminologist Dr Nicola Harding sat down with Salv CEO Taavi Tamkivi to explore how a mathematician ended up building financial crime collaboration infrastructure for Europe and beyond.
In 2005, Skype was a rapidly growing unicorn. As it launched paid services, it became an attractive target for fraudsters, and credit card fraud surged. Tamkivi recalled that “The money lost to the fraud was enough that they could rent a Boeing 767 and constantly drive around the world.”
Tamkivi stepped away from his maths and machine learning studies to join Skype’s newly formed anti-fraud team as a data analyst. Each fraudulent incident was modest in isolation — around €10 — but the sheer volume made the problem enormous. “It was a huge data problem,” he said. “The loss of each single fraud case was super small, but together, massive.” Fraudsters, he noted, had already automated much of their activity: “Fraudsters back then were already able to automate their processes.”
A pivotal shift came when Tamkivi encountered Ethoca, a platform facilitating early-stage intelligence sharing around chargebacks. Traditional chargeback processing could take months, but Ethoca enabled near-instant signal sharing once a victim reported an incident to their bank. “Official chargeback submission and processing took three, four months actually,” he explained. “But as soon as the information was submitted by the victim to the bank, Ethoca was engaged… and it was possible to learn from these fraud patterns really quickly.”
The experience offered an early lesson in what becomes possible when intelligence moves between institutions rather than remaining locked within them.
Tamkivi later joined Wise — then known as TransferWise — as employee number 40, where he first encountered what would eventually be called authorised push payment (APP) fraud, long before the term existed. One case involved Swedish retirees unwittingly transferring funds to a fraudulent furniture seller, with the money swiftly moved abroad. “There was no legal way to compensate these people,” he said. “And we weren’t able to detect those cases too well.”
Compounding the problem, there was no structured mechanism to alert the receiving bank. A colleague imagined what Tamkivi called the “Poolside Margarita” scenario: “If we can build trust and connections between fraud people in banks to transfer this kind of critical information… then we can all sit back and relax and actually all the fraud is gone.”
The information required to make that vision real — transaction details, account identifiers, real-time fraud signals — was highly sensitive. And when Wise attempted to warn a counterpart bank about stolen funds that had landed in their accounts, the response was startling. “They were trying to call to warn them about stolen money that had landed in their accounts,” Tamkivi said. “And the reaction was to physically drop the call.”
Having spent years developing internal systems at Skype and Wise, Tamkivi set out to tackle a problem he saw repeated across the industry: financial institutions fighting crime in isolation, duplicating effort on capabilities that were never their core business. “I have a bit of knowledge about how to fight financial crime,” he said. “How can I help other companies, other financial institutions not to overspend their internal resource on these things, which are not their core focus?”
Salv was founded to answer that question. The company initially focused on anti-money laundering (AML) tools — screening, transaction monitoring, and risk scoring — but a breakthrough came in Estonia in 2020. Working alongside leading local institutions, Salv ran structured pilots built around three parallel workstreams: technical design for secure, compliant intelligence exchange; legal frameworks co-developed with banks, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), and the Data Protection Inspectorate; and use case mapping to identify the most valuable information flows across fraud and AML.
“We spent about three months trying to figure out everything,” Tamkivi said. “We had 15 different use cases and 15 different user stories around data sharing.”
The UK played a parallel role. While Salv was working with Baltic institutions and through Mastercard’s Lighthouse Programme, the FCA in London convened a hackathon bringing together banks, lawyers, and technologists to prototype intelligence sharing systems — an early signal that appetite for this kind of infrastructure was genuine and growing.
From the outset, governance and trust-building were treated as indispensable. “It’s not only about product and tech,” Tamkivi said. “It’s about people who need to trust each other.” Dr Harding echoed that point: “There are way more key stakeholders than you might think at the beginning. It’s not just financial institutions. It’s governments, regulators, and the public too.”
The Estonian pilot evolved into Salv Bridge, a live intelligence-sharing platform launched in 2021 and now acting as critical infrastructure for tier 1 institutions in Estonia and Latvia, with additional institutions connected across Europe and the UK.
Even with pilots under way and legal frameworks in place, collaboration remained difficult. Tamkivi observed that some of the largest banks involved were reluctant to share even their own learnings. “Some large banks… they’re even shy to share these learnings with others,” he said. “They’re afraid that they sound immature or give the impression they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Dr Harding highlighted the stakes of getting it wrong: “Bad intelligence or immature tooling… it just hasn’t come from experience. It can really be quite damaging in that battle against fraudsters and financial institutions.”
As Salv’s model matured, Tamkivi articulated a framework for resilient collaboration built on three components. First, reliable data: “It has to be fresh. It has to be accessible. It has to be unobfuscated.” Second, decision engines capable of continuous learning: “Learning from your own mistakes and successes, learning from others, training your models.” Third, real-time action capability: “Suspending payments, suspending accounts, submitting extra questions to customers… or asking peers to take some actions if the money is already gone.”
Without these pillars, he argued, collaboration collapses — signals remain siloed, false positives overwhelm review teams, and criminals outpace the systems designed to catch them.
Regulation is now formalising what was previously voluntary. The Payment Services Regulation (PSR) Article 83 requires financial institutions and payment service providers to connect to domestic and international intelligence-sharing networks. As Tamkivi noted, the wording carries legal weight: “The Payment Services Regulation says that financial institutions and payment service providers shall connect to their domestic and international networks. And by law, this ‘shall’ as I just learned means must.”
AMLR Article 75 extends similar obligations across Europe, mandating pan-European intelligence exchange. “Now it falls into the same basket with ‘I shall do KYC’ and ‘I shall do AML monitoring’… I shall connect with network providers,” Tamkivi said. Within a few years, regulators will expect institutions not just to claim they share intelligence, but to demonstrate precisely how they do it.
Salv’s own evolution reflects this broader shift. “We’re becoming more and more like an infrastructure provider,” Tamkivi explained, drawing comparisons to the backbone systems underpinning modern communications and payments: GSM networks, SWIFT, SEPA. “We are clearly taking a role right now to be this GSM network for the fincrime teams across Europe.”
Salv Bridge, in that framing, is where the Poolside Margarita vision becomes operational reality.
Despite the progress made, the gap between crime fighters and criminals remains real. “Still criminals are ahead of the crime fighters,” Tamkivi acknowledged. “And my job is to reduce the gap or get closer to the criminals. It’s not vice versa.”
Dr Harding pointed out that criminal networks also rely on infrastructure to communicate and coordinate — and they build and adopt it faster than regulated institutions can. “The key thing is we need that reliable, trustworthy infrastructure on our side,” she said. Building that infrastructure, and sustaining the trust required to make it work, is precisely the challenge Salv Bridge was created to meet.
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