Industry webinar to debate rules for AI-driven fraud

An upcoming webinar organised with Ecommpay will bring industry experts together to discuss regulatory changes and cross-industry collaboration aimed at countering human-targeted, AI-enhanced financial fraud.

Interpol warns that financial fraud is among the fastest-evolving transnational crimes and that AI-enhanced techniques are about 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. Fraudsters are focusing on human vulnerabilities and using tools that make scams harder to spot for consumers and institutions.

Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay, will appear on the panel. Teresa Connors will act as moderator.

Panelists will examine how fragmented oversight and limited data sharing impede detection and response. Financial regulators, data protection authorities, law enforcement and consumer protection bodies all have roles related to fraud, and no single organisation holds end-to-end responsibility.

Speakers will outline regulatory conflicts that affect cooperation. Privacy and data protection rules can limit sharing of transaction and identity data across firms and borders. Competition and antitrust rules can complicate joint arrangements. Liability concerns discourage companies from pooling intelligence. Differences in regulatory capacity raise compliance costs for smaller firms.

The panel will consider specific reform options. Proposals include standardised reporting formats and taxonomies for fraud incidents, legal safe harbours to permit controlled sharing of threat intelligence, tiered obligations that scale with firm size and risk, and neutral non-profit platforms to collect and distribute anonymised fraud signals in real time.

Discussion will cover potential benefits and drawbacks. Standardisation could speed detection, reduce duplicated work and create clearer escalation routes between firms and authorities. It could also enable coordinated consumer warnings and comparable metrics for regulators. Possible drawbacks include the risk of centralised data becoming a target, the technical and governance burden of running a shared platform, conflicts with national laws and the challenge of achieving industry-wide adoption.

The webinar will be used to identify practical steps and legal changes needed to enable secure information sharing and to outline what type of industry-led infrastructure could support those changes.