Treating fraud as an ecosystem: regulatory change needed

An online webinar hosted with Ecommpay will bring together compliance and technology leaders to examine regulatory reform and cross‑industry collaboration aimed at fighting AI‑enhanced, human‑focused financial fraud.

Panelists confirmed for the session are Willem Wellinghoff, UK Chair and Chief Compliance Officer at Ecommpay; Anne Leslie, Head of Cloud Risk EMEA at IBM; and Pallavi Kapale, Senior Financial Crime Officer (FIU) (2LOD) at Bank of China. Teresa Connors will moderate the discussion.

Interpol warns that financial fraud is one of the world’s most severe and rapidly evolving transnational crimes with significant economic and human consequences, and estimates AI‑enhanced fraud is about 4.5 times more profitable than traditional methods. The panel will examine the shift by fraudsters toward exploiting human vulnerabilities such as trust, social pressure and information overload, combined with automation and synthetic content that make attacks harder to detect for consumers and institutions.

Speakers will review how responsibilities for fraud prevention are distributed across multiple regulatory and oversight bodies, leaving no single entity with end‑to‑end authority. The panel will consider how that fragmentation affects responses to cross‑border schemes and where gaps allow fraud to persist.

The webinar will also address the limited sharing of data and intelligence between firms. Many organisations use proprietary tools, rules and feeds that do not interoperate, which can reduce the effectiveness of detection and response across the industry.

Panelists are expected to outline possible regulatory reforms, including clearer allocation of oversight duties across agencies, legal frameworks for secure cross‑industry data sharing, standardised incident reporting requirements, and regulatory safe harbors that could lower legal risk for firms that share threat intelligence.

The discussion will weigh potential benefits and barriers to creating standardised fraud processes or a non‑profit, system‑wide data aggregator. Standardisation could speed detection and reduce duplicated effort. Barriers include differing data protection laws by jurisdiction, competition rules that limit information exchange, costs for smaller firms, and technical issues around data quality, consumer privacy and governance.

Regulatory conflicts on data privacy, anti‑money laundering, consumer protection and national security will form part of the debate, along with the legal and operational hurdles to cross‑border investigations. The panel will consider practical next steps such as pilot shared intelligence hubs, minimum reporting standards for suspicious activity, and public‑private partnerships that maintain legal compliance while enabling faster information flow.