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News and resources on financial crime, including fraud, scams, Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer.

New Industry Survey Report – Navigating the Nordic financial landscape: 2025 challenges and prioritiFinextra PromotedNew Industry Survey Report – Navigating the Nordic financial landscape: 2025 challenges and priorities

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Expert opinions

Roy Zur

Roy Zur CEO at Charm Security

Training AI Agents Like Behavioral Scientists to Excel at Preventing Scams and Fraud

As scams become more advanced and personalized, the tactics used to manipulate individuals are increasingly rooted in behavioral psychology. What once required blunt deception now relies on nuance: fraudsters exploit victims' fears, biases, and emotional vulnerabilities with surgical precision. With fraudsters now equipped with generative AI tool...

/security /crime Banking Strategy, Digital and Transformation

Alex Rees

Alex Rees Web Strategy at Facctum

Why Real-Time Compliance Will Define the Future of RegTech

Regulatory compliance has traditionally been a slow-moving function—reactive, rules-based, and tethered to manual review cycles. But the pace of modern finance demands a fundamental rethinking. As financial crime becomes more sophisticated and real-time transactions dominate, the compliance function must operate at the speed of risk. Legacy compl

/regulation /crime RegTech

Steve Carpenter

Steve Carpenter Chief Operating Officer of North America at Creditsafe

Act Now or Pay Later: Why Anti-Fraud Training Is Your Best Line of Defense

Fraudsters are more creative than ever, and businesses are paying the price. With 41% of companies facing 7 or more fraud cases in just the first eight months of 2024 alone, the question isn't if your organization will be targeted—it's when. Yet, despite this growing threat, many organizations remain unprepared, relying on outdated or insufficient...

/security /crime

Jonathan Hancock

Jonathan Hancock Head of Product & Innovation at The ai Corporation

A Guide to Strategic High-Risk Merchant Management

With a powerful growth engine, today's digital marketplace presents acquirers with the critical challenge of managing high-risk merchants. Success in this arena hinges on a dynamic and adaptable strategy, balancing opportunity with security. The definition of "high-risk" is fluid, constantly reshaped by technological advancements and shi...

/payments /crime The Payments Business

Kathiravan Rajendran

Kathiravan Rajendran Associate Director of Marketing Operations at Macro Global

The Silent Shift Reshaping Financial Institutions Regulatory Compliance in 2025

The regulatory landscape for financial institutions continues to evolve with increasing speed and complexity. Navigating the FCA's latest directives and aligning with global initiatives like the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) are just two examples of how compliance today demands far more than simply checking boxes. It calls for a fundamental reth...

/regulation /crime Banking Regulations

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Research

Survey

Navigating the Nordic financial landscape: 2025 challenges and priorities

As the Nordic financial sector faces new hurdles and opportunities, a variety of issues are front and centre for financial institutions, technology providers, and fintechs.  Our latest survey of 150 responses reveals how Nordic institutions across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden are navigating the current landscape and their strategic priorities for 2025. Providing valuable insights into areas such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), Verification of Payee (VoP), AI’s growing role in financial services, perspectives on central bank digital currency (CBDC) and stablecoin, and evolving payment trends such as Account-to-Account (A2A) and instant payments.  Analysis of our survey responses provides a comprehensive overview on how Nordic institutions are navigating transformation shaped by innovation, regulation, and evolving customer expectations, with progress and priorities varying by country.  We explore regional specific views towards:  Key priorities for 2025  Readiness for Verification of Payee (VoP)  Strategic AI integration for real impact  The rise of A2A, instant, and mobile payments  Attitudes towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoin  The impact of DORA 

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Future of Report

The Future of US Digital Payments 2025: ACH & Beyond

A special edition for Nacha's Smarter Faster Payments 2025.    The US digital payments landscape stands at a transformative crossroads. With the launch of RTP in 2016 and FedNow in 2023, the foundational infrastructure for instant payments is finally in place - poised to revolutionise the speed, efficiency, and security of transactions across the economy.    Yet despite these advancements, the path to widespread adoption remains complex and cautious. Entrenched systems like ACH and Wire, with their deep integration and long-standing reliability, continue to dominate due to their established utility and the significant investment required to pivot toward newer rails.    It’s not just a question of technological readiness, but of mindset, cost, and strategy. The advantages of instant payments—real-time access to funds, reduced credit risk, and improved liquidity—are clear. However, to truly unlock these benefits, banks and institutions must overcome the inertia of legacy systems and embrace modernisation, often with the support of flexible, cloud-native solutions that can de-risk and streamline the transition.    This Finextra report, in association with Form 3, explores industry sentiment on the future of US digital payments and showcases the views of BNY, Citizens, Green Dot, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Bank, and the US Faster Payments Council. It explores:    Evolving ACH infrastructure;  Enhancing RPT and FedNow capabilities;  How new rails interact with existing rails;  Redefining transactional architecture through emerging technologies;  Recognising risk as a strategic advantage in fraud prevention;  Prioritising innovation and compliance at the same time. 

300 downloads

Event Report

The US Instant Payments Landscape: Navigating Growth and Challenges

The increasing demand for instant payment solutions is a key trend driving the adoption of faster payments. This webinar report explores what is holding instant payments back in the US.  In the US, real-time payments (RTP) have grown significantly since The Clearing House introduced them in 2017. Currently, the RTP network covers approximately 70% of customer accounts in the US, with transaction volumes and values rising dramatically. The Federal Reserve’s FedNow service, launched in mid-2023, has also contributed to this growth, processing a substantial number of payments in its initial quarters. These networks provide low-cost, efficient payment solutions that are gaining popularity for both consumer and business transactions.  Despite this progress, challenges remain in the adoption of faster payments. Interoperability between different payment systems and networks is a primary issue. While domestic instant payments are becoming more common, cross-border instant payments face obstacles due to the complexity of multi-currency transactions and varying regulations across countries. Additionally, the regulatory environment in the US does not mandate the adoption of faster payments, which can slow down the pace of implementation compared to other markets with regulatory mandates.  This report highlights the key takeaways of a Finextra webinar, hosted for the PREDICT 2025 campaign, by a panel of industry experts. It aims to answer:  What is holding Faster Payments back in the US and how much progress can be attributed to open banking and the ISO 20022 standard? Which applications of Faster Payments in the UK are transferrable to the US? With RtP and FedNow, how much choice is too much choice? What evidence is there that the financial services industry is at a tipping point and technology must be leveraged to ramp up adoption?

350 downloads

/crime

FinextraTV

How Can AI and Collaboration Combat Rising Financial Crime?

In a conversation ahead of Sibos 2024, Laura Quevedo, Executive Vice President of Financial Crime and Resiliency at Mastercard, highlights the growing threat of financial scams in the digital age, with cybercriminals increasingly using AI to exploit consumers. Companies are stepping up their investments in cybersecurity and AI technology to stay ahead of evolving threats, as AI-powered tools like real-time fraud detection solutions become critical in preventing financial crime. Quevedo emphasises a three-pronged strategy: leveraging AI for fraud prevention, collaborating across industries to share insights, and educating consumers on emerging scams.

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Long reads

Scott Hamilton

Scott Hamilton Contributing Editor at Finextra Research

How AML and fraud teams are collaborating to lower risk and fight financial crime

Financial institution (FI) fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) teams are finally starting to work together! 80% of them, in fact. Plus, 53% of institutions' AML and financial crime departments share part or all of the systems they use, and 100% of the FIs surveyed use artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their arsenal across many different u...

Madhvi Sonia

Madhvi Sonia Head of Content at Finextra

Global fraud challenges and strategies to combat them

Nacha event Smarter Faster Payments in New Orleans set aside an hour to discuss the importance of collaboration among financial institutions and regulators, the role of data sharing in improving fraud detection, and the need for robust fraud controls. This global panel highlighted South Africa’s fraud journey, that has focused on prevention, detec...

Pallavi Kapale

Pallavi Kapale Senior Financial Crime Officer (2LOD) at Bank of China

Love, lies, and laundering: Unmasking the ‘pig butchering scam’ and how banks can fight back

According to the Council of Foreign Relations, numerous criminal organisations, primarily originating from China, have established sophisticated cyber centers in Southeast Asia that are specifically dedicated to conduct fraudulent activities. These call centers carry out a form of fraud known as ‘pig butchering’, combination of romance and invest...