Webinar to discuss regulatory fixes for AI-enabled fraud

An online webinar hosted with Ecommpay will convene industry experts to examine regulatory reform and cross-industry collaboration to counter human-targeted and AI-enhanced financial fraud. Willem Wellinghoff, UK chair and chief compliance officer at Ecommpay, will join the panel and Teresa Connors will moderate.

Organisers cite an Interpol alert that describes financial fraud as a fast-growing transnational crime and states AI-enhanced fraud can be about 4.5 times more profitable than traditional schemes. The webinar will look at how fraud has shifted from exploiting technical vulnerabilities to targeting human behaviour, and why that change affects detection and prevention.

Speakers will describe a fragmented response across the sector. Multiple regulatory and oversight bodies have roles that touch fraud prevention, and firms use different tools, processes and reporting practices. Limited data sharing between organisations and varying sizes and resources among businesses are identified as factors that weaken collective defenses.

Panelists will outline possible regulatory reforms that could create a more unified approach while recognising firms face different risks and capacities. Proposals under discussion include clearer allocation of oversight responsibilities, harmonised incident reporting rules, and legal mechanisms to enable secure, lawful sharing of fraud data across institutions and borders. The discussion will also cover consumer privacy safeguards and competition law limits that affect shared systems.

The webinar will examine the case for a standardised fraud process, including a common taxonomy and reporting protocol that could reduce duplicate work and improve anomaly detection models. Critics will raise concerns about compliance costs for smaller firms, technical and legal barriers to interoperability, and the risk a single standard may lag behind evolving fraud methods.

Speakers will discuss regulatory obstacles, such as overlapping mandates among agencies and national differences in data protection, anti-money laundering rules and law enforcement access. Reforms to be considered include legal safe-harbour provisions for sharing fraud indicators, a centralised non-profit repository for anonymised data and international cooperation frameworks that balance enforcement and privacy.

The event will also consider practical actions firms can take now, including behavioural fraud detection techniques, expanded information exchange within legal limits and coordinated incident reporting that contributes to collective intelligence. Organisers say any systemic solution will need governance that accommodates firms of differing sizes and incentives to encourage participation.