Organised crime forces banks to rethink fraud prevention

Industry leaders say collaboration is key to combating organised financial crime.

Financial institutions can no longer fight fraud alone, with industry leaders saying collaboration across banks, insurers, regulators and law enforcement has become critical as organised criminal networks become more sophisticated.

Speaking at the Asian Banking & Finance and Insurance Asia Summit in Singapore on 1 July, executives from OCBC, Standard Chartered, Liberty International Insurance and Deloitte said tackling financial crime increasingly depends on sharing intelligence across institutions rather than relying solely on individual organisations' defences.

"We can compete with each other on innovation, products, margins, revenues, but when it comes to fraud, crime prevention, we have to collaborate together," said Nauman Bashir, managing director and global head of Digital Sales at Standard Chartered Bank.

Royston Soon, executive director for Group Anti-Fraud at OCBC, said collaboration has become a daily operational necessity.

"When it comes to scams, we don't collaborate occasionally, it's almost every day, because scams happen every day," he said.

Soon cited OCBC's Anti-Scam Unit, which works with the Singapore Police Force to freeze suspicious accounts and trace stolen funds. The bank has also stationed staff at the police's Anti-Scam Command to speed up investigations.

Beyond bilateral partnerships, Soon said banks are increasingly working through industry groups to develop common anti-scam strategies.

"We want to make sure that what banks will compete [on]—by fighting scams, we don't compete, we go together as one," he said.

The next phase of collaboration will involve broader intelligence sharing. Soon highlighted an upcoming initiative led by the police and the Monetary Authority of Singapore that will allow participating banks to review past transactions and identify customers who may have transferred funds to known scam accounts through a shared portal.

The panellists also stressed that technology alone cannot solve the problem. Whilst artificial intelligence has strengthened fraud detection, they said human judgement and accountability remain essential.

"AI alone is not everything. Human judgment is needed, accountability. Human accountability is still needed," Soon said.

Jamie King, director for Forensic and Financial Crime at Deloitte, said institutions are now confronting organised criminal networks rather than isolated fraudsters.

"It wasn't so very long ago that fraud was an opportunistic actor acting alone," he said. "The big shift... is we're now dealing with criminal networks at enormous scale."

He said this requires organisations to move beyond monitoring individual transactions towards identifying criminal networks through shared intelligence, behavioural analytics and trust-based monitoring. King also called for fraud, anti-money laundering and cybersecurity teams to work more closely together as financial crime increasingly spans multiple disciplines.

David Tam, regional chief information officer for Liberty International Insurance Asia Pacific, said insurers face similar challenges and called for closer cooperation across sectors.

"All the insurance transactions eventually land into a bank account somewhere," he said. "I think there's a lot more we can do."

The panellists said collaboration must extend beyond financial institutions to include regulators, law enforcement agencies, telecommunications providers and technology firms.

"The bad guys are beyond borders," Bashir said. "It's about ecosystem... making sure that we are collaborating and working with all of them in all jurisdictions to prevent crime in the first place."