FFIS Report: Regulators Must Take a More Proactive Approach to Encourage Private-Sector Collaboration in the Fight Against Fraud
As part of its continued investment in research and public sector education, FNA recently contributed to a pivotal new policy discussion paper from the Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing (FFIS) program, a research partnership with the RUSI Centre for Financial Crime & Security Studies. It emphasizes the urgent need for supervisors and policymakers to actively support private-sector collaboration in the fight against economic crime.
The report, ‘A New Era of Private Sector Collaboration to Detect Economic Crime’, examines key legislative developments between 2023 and 2024 that have enabled or will enable financial institutions and other stakeholders to share intelligence to fight fraud and money laundering. While voluntary information-sharing frameworks are becoming more common, the report argues that supervisors and policymakers must take an active role in fostering private-sector collaboration. Enhanced data-sharing protocols are crucial to ensuring that critical fraud prevention data can be shared more widely, safely, and securely. The report provides an overview of how legislative frameworks have been strengthened to facilitate both domestic and cross-border information sharing, offering policymakers, supervisors, and industry leaders a valuable resource for ensuring that regulations support innovation in financial crime detection while safeguarding consumers.
As a practical example, the paper highlights Malaysia’s National Fraud Portal deploying FNA’s Money Trails to track and trace fraudulently acquired funds cross-banks in real-time and recover stolen monies for fraud victims. Despite the absence of an explicit AML P2P information-sharing legal framework, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet) launched the National Fraud Portal (NFP) in April 2024, working with FNA to leverage the national payments infrastructure to support automated fund tracing and recovery. The NFP has significantly improved Malaysia’s response to fraud and scams. As of November 2024, the rate of fraud-risk funds being frozen increased from 0.5% to 30% while the average time to investigate each case was reduced by 70% to 30 minutes.
Fostering collaboration and data sharing is crucial to the development of advanced technical solutions like FNA’s National Fraud Portal that offers jurisdictions the ability to track cross-bank payments in real-time, detect mule activity, and apply risk scores to payments to accelerate the detection, investigation, and prevention of fraud and scams. The success of NFP in Malaysia demonstrates the possibilities enhanced data-sharing protocols can offer in the development of innovative technological solutions to combat economic crime.
Read the full report sponsored by FNA, Swift, Mastercard, Deloitte, HSBC, and Nasdaq Verafin here: https://www.future-fis.com/newera.html
Learn more about how FNA is combatting fraud and scams through National Fraud Portals here.
