Fighting fraud as an ecosystem: calls for regulatory reform

A webinar hosted with Ecommpay will examine how financial fraud has shifted toward exploiting human vulnerabilities and outline regulatory and industry reforms intended to enable ecosystem-wide collaboration against modern financial crime.

Organisers plan to bring together industry experts to explain why individual firms’ efforts are no longer sufficient and to identify changes needed across regulators, businesses and technology providers. The discussion will reference Interpol’s assessment that financial fraud is among the most serious transnational crimes and the organisation’s estimate that fraud enhanced by artificial intelligence is about 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods.

Panelists will describe how fraud techniques have become harder for consumers and institutions to spot. Current prevention work is fragmented: multiple regulatory and oversight bodies have responsibilities that touch on fraud, leaving no single authority with full end-to-end oversight. At the same time, firms build their own detection tools and protocols and share limited data with other organisations, which reduces collective defensive capacity.

Speakers will consider what regulatory reform could look like. Proposals under discussion include clearer allocation of responsibilities across regulators and frameworks that scale requirements to the size, risk exposure and technical capacity of different businesses. The session will also examine standardised fraud processes and what they would require in practice.

Supporters of standardisation expect it could improve information sharing, make detection rules more consistent and reduce duplicated effort. Critics point to costs for smaller firms, the need for governance and trust mechanisms, and legal limits on sharing personal and commercial data. Panelists will identify barriers to creating a single non-profit or systemic solution, including regulatory conflicts, data-protection rules, competition concerns and the absence of shared incentives to exchange threat intelligence.

The webinar will be moderated by Teresa Connors, contributing editor, and will feature Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay. The event will be held online; organisers provide registration and scheduling details.