Building Trust at Speed: Why National Scam Response Needs an End-to-End Solution
By Kimmo Soramäki (FNA) & Curtis Matlock (Proto)
On 8 July, Financial Network Analytics (FNA) and Proto had the opportunity to speak on the RegTech for Fraud Management panel, moderated by Deborah Young, at the Global Payments Week hosted by Banco Central do Brasil and organized by the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
During this discussion, joined by Francesca Hopwood Road from the BIS Innovation Hub London and Benjamin Lee from Nexus Global Payments, the FNA and Proto founders focused on their recent collaboration to build trust in rapid consumer complaint systems and protect citizens from scams and financial abuse.
The panel’s context was set by Deborah Young: digital payment systems have transformed financial ecosystems worldwide, delivering speed, convenience, and inclusion—but this transformation has come with fast-evolving scams that are harder to detect. Understanding the scam and fraud difference is critical here. While traditional fraud often relies on unauthorized access, modern scams depend on authorized manipulation. Funds can move between accounts and institutions in seconds, leaving authorities little time to intervene. At the same time, scam victims often struggle to report incidents or get timely help, particularly in countries with complex or decentralised financial systems.
Despite years of progress in fraud detection, many countries still rely on fragmented, institution-by-institution approaches to scam response. These models depend on manual escalation, informal coordination between supervisory authorities, and call centre infrastructure that is not built for real-time action. As a result, both consumers and public institutions face unacceptable delays and losses. The gaps between victim reporting, institutional investigation, and funds recovery are often too wide to prevent harm.
What is needed is a national utility—such as a shared National Fraud Portal—that connects all the pieces of the fraud response chain into one coordinated platform.
Delivering an End-to-End Fraud Response System
An effective fraud utility must do more than detect suspicious activity. It must bridge the full journey from scam reporting by a victim, through investigation and funds tracing, to real-time intervention and resolution. This means uniting citizen engagement, institutional workflows, and national infrastructure into a single, seamless platform.
The combined solution from FNA and Proto offers exactly this: a purpose-built national utility that enables both public-facing fraud reporting and back-end multi-institution tracing. It integrates two critical components:
Frictionless Scam Reporting from the Public
Citizens can report scams instantly through Proto's AI assistants for local languages via everyday channels like WhatsApp or SMS. This reduces the barriers of language, income level, location, and stigma that often prevent victims from coming forward. Cases are captured, classified, and prioritised using real-time signals and behavioural context.
Coordinated Fund Tracing and Resolution Across Institutions
Once a case is submitted, financial institutions can trace the movement of funds in seconds across payment service providers, bank networks, and switches. Utilizing advanced financial network analytics, investigators are guided to the relevant accounts, risks are assessed, and the system supports timely freeze requests when permitted by law. Case updates are tracked in shared dashboards, ensuring transparency and speed, and citizens are kept informed through the AI assistants.
Instead of isolated tools or manual handoffs, this approach delivers an integrated response capability and robust payment fraud detection within the critical 24-hour window following an incident of fraud. Every actor in the system—from consumers to fraud analysts to law enforcement—has a defined role, and the unified platform ensures their alignment.
Keeping Up with Threat Actors
Most countries already have tools in place for fraud monitoring, transaction analysis, or citizen complaints. But without integration, these systems leave critical gaps. A complaint may be captured but not acted on. A suspicious account may be flagged but not connected to victim reports. Authorities may act too late, or not at all. Threat actors using increasingly sophisticated methods are able to exploit these gaps and commit fraud against vulnerable consumers, thus eroding citizen trust in the overall financial system.
The end-to-end platform solves these problems by:
Ensuring that victims can report scams immediately, in their own language, and with confidence.
Giving institutions the tools to act on complaints with shared context and real-time tracing.
Enabling collaboration across PSPs, regulators, banks, and enforcement bodies within a secure and controlled environment.
Reducing delays, errors, and duplicated effort through a common case management system.
Delivering measurable impact through faster resolutions, higher fund recovery rates, and greater public trust.
A Proven Model for Trust and Resilience
In Malaysia, for example, this model has already shown success. A national deployment of the National Fraud Portal handled tens of thousands of cases within months and achieved full fund earmarking for over 20 percent of victims, far above legacy approaches. Similar benefits have been seen in multilingual markets such as the Philippines, where inclusive AI-based reporting saw a tripling in the number of official complaints submitted.
As scams continue to evolve, countries cannot afford to treat fraud response as a patchwork of disconnected processes. A national utility that brings together citizens, financial institutions, and supervisors into one system is no longer a luxury. It is becoming a foundational part of trusted digital payments and financial resilience.
The joint solution from FNA and Proto provides a modular and scalable path forward that respects data boundaries and regulatory structures, enabling proactive fraud resolution rather than reactive firefighting.
To learn how FNA and Proto are helping central banks and regulators bridge the gap between citizen reporting and fund recovery, explore FNA's Fraud Portals Solution.
