Summary of Payment Systems Broadcast #25: Building Trust at Speed:

Insights

1 Nov

“The faster our money moves, the faster it can disappear.”

Dr. Amanah Ramadiah opens FNA’s Payment Systems Broadcast with that observation, introducing FNA and Proto—two technology firms that have partnered to address one of the fastest-growing risks to the financial system: consumer scams and fraud. In 2023 alone, more than one trillion US dollars were lost to fraud and deception, a figure that underscores how financial inclusion and instant payments—while bringing undeniable benefits—have also created new vulnerabilities.

For FNA founder and CEO, Dr. Kimmo Soramäki, the shift has been dramatic. “I’ve been talking with… authorities from over 60 countries. And pretty much everyone says that it’s a massive issue today,” he said. Financial inclusion initiatives have drawn millions of new users into the financial system, which, thanks to the spread of instant payments, now moves faster than ever. Fraudsters have seized the opportunity—exploiting speed and new technologies, including generative AI, to operate at an industrial scale, target vulnerable consumers, and move money across multiple banks and payment rails in seconds, often through mule accounts to conceal funds from individual banks and law enforcement.

Against this backdrop, FNA and Proto have developed a joint initiative that connects citizens, bank,s and regulators in real time. The aim is to accelerate investigations, enable instant fund tracing, and increase the likelihood that stolen money can be recovered before it leaves the financial system.

Proto, which operates multilingual complaint-management systems for regulators in markets such as the Philippines and Rwanda, manages the “front door” of the process. Its conversational AI agents allow citizens to report scams quickly and discreetly through familiar channels like WhatsApp, Messenger, or SMS, in the language they use every day. “Proto is on the front lines,” said Proto CEO Curtis Matlock. He noted that a significant share of complaints relate to scams and e-wallets/mobile money, and the impact is deeply personal for low-income citizens: “Half of those cases involve amounts of around 10,000 Philippine pesos, roughly a monthly wage.”

The AI system collects the key details—names, account numbers, transaction values, attachments—and routes each report directly to the appropriate authority, reducing the delays that often occur when complaints are passed between institutions. “What we don’t want is to deploy systems like a web form,” Matlock explained. “We want to take in whatever data we can and get that into a central system as fast as possible.”

Once a report is received, FNA’s Money Trails platform automatically maps the movement of stolen funds across banks and payment rails in real time, alerting all relevant institutions simultaneously. “Criminals use mule accounts to move money before banks can coordinate,” Soramäki said. “Our system consolidates the picture of the money trail and alerts the banks in parallel immediately.” This synchronised approach gives institutions a critical window to freeze accounts before the funds are moved offshore or converted to cash or cryptocurrency.

Security and data protection are built in from the start. Proto’s Chief Technology Officer, Weiying Kok, described how every component is deployed within a secure, government-approved cloud or on-premise environment. “We use end-to-end encryption and rule-based permissions to ensure all sensitive information is protected,” she said. The architecture is designed to scale from a few incidents to thousands per day while complying with national data-sovereignty requirements. “All data is processed within the country’s borders,” she added, “and if intelligence needs to be shared cross-border, personal information is tokenized or masked.”

Legislation is another essential piece of the puzzle. As Soramäki noted, “In most countries, there needs to be legislation that allows financial institutions to share fraud information with each other.” Some jurisdictions have already introduced new rules under anti-money-laundering or fraud-prevention laws to enable such coordination. Even then, the amount of data exchanged remains limited to what is strictly necessary to connect accounts and transactions, with automation providing the speed.

The impact of this coordinated approach is already evident. In Malaysia, where FNA’s technology supports the national fraud portal, “in 21% of the cases that are promptly reported, they can freeze the whole fraud amount,” Soramäki said. Across all cases, recovery and freezing rates have risen sharply, while investigation times have fallen. “We’ve seen a 75% reduction… in the case closure times,” he added, allowing teams to handle several times more cases with the same resources.

Equally important is how the system encourages victims to come forward. “Once people learn there’s a chance to get their money back, they will actually report the scam,” Soramäki said. Each report adds to a growing national dataset of fraud patterns and mule accounts, strengthening prevention and enforcement. For Matlock, accessibility and empathy are central to that progress: “By training the agents to understand and respond empathetically in the local language using the same type of expression styles, we can overall build consumer trust and start to take in more complaints.”

Looking ahead, the two companies expect the model to evolve into shared public infrastructure, operated by central authorities and open to collaboration with banks, payment providers, and technology firms. “The idea is to move it away from compliance into infrastructure,” Soramäki explained. Regional cooperation is also on the horizon. “We’ll start seeing anti-scam centres being connected regionally,” he said, “because there are corridors that criminals use to transfer funds.”

By combining Proto’s citizen-facing AI systems with FNA’s real-time analytics, the partnership offers what Soramäki calls “an industrial-scale response to an industrial-scale problem.” It turns the act of reporting a scam from a dead end into the first step of a coordinated, rapid investigation. Their collaborative solution—focused on inclusion, trust, and speed—has already gained international recognition, having been shortlisted as a finalist in the 2025 G20 TechSprint on fraud and cyber-risk mitigation.