Fraud as an ecosystem: regulators and firms must adapt

An online webinar hosted with Ecommpay will gather industry experts to discuss treating fraud as an ecosystem, regulatory reforms and industry-wide data sharing to counter AI-enhanced financial fraud. Speakers include Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay. Teresa Connors will moderate. The event will be held online and registration is open.

Interpol describes financial fraud as one of the world’s most severe transnational crimes and reports that AI-enhanced fraud is 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Attackers increasingly target human vulnerabilities such as social engineering, impersonation and manipulative messaging, making schemes harder to detect for consumers and institutions.

Panelists will address three core problems: responsibility for fraud prevention is spread across multiple regulatory and oversight bodies with no single entity holding end-to-end authority; individual firms often develop detection tools and frameworks in isolation; and data sharing between organisations remains limited. These factors fragment responses, slow detection and leave gaps for sophisticated attackers.

Speakers will outline proposals for regulatory reform, including clearer delineation of oversight responsibilities across agencies, standards for cross-border reporting of fraud incidents and regulatory guidance that scales expectations by firm size and risk profile. The discussion will cover legal barriers to cooperation such as data protection rules and competition law, and possible remedies including legal safe harbours, anonymisation techniques and consent frameworks.

The panel will examine industry-wide standardisation of fraud processes. Standardisation could speed sharing of indicators, enable consistent incident reporting and support interoperable tools. Participants will note limitations: small and medium-sized firms may lack the resources to adopt complex standards, uniform processes risk missing sector-specific threats, and mandatory common frameworks could create single points of failure if not governed carefully.

Speakers will consider a systemic, non-profit body to collect and anonymise shared intelligence, coordinate responses and develop open standards. Discussion points include funding mechanisms, governance structures to build trust and the interaction with national laws on data sharing and liability.

The webinar will identify near-term steps organisations can take, such as improving the quality and timeliness of industry-wide alerts, defining minimum incident-reporting requirements and creating templates for secure, anonymised data exchange. The conversation will also cover aligning public enforcement, private-sector tools and consumer education so interventions support each other.

The event intends to shift discussion from individual firm defences to coordinated ecosystem responses and to identify where regulatory reform and shared processes could reduce opportunities for fraud while recognising differences in firm size, resources and risk exposure.