The Collaboration Gap in Fraud Prevention

The Payments Podcast by Bottomline

Episode Transcript

Owen McDonald: Welcome to The Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Bottomline Managing Editor, Owen McDonald. Let's set the mood. It's June 2026, and the US Treasury is taking further action against a Cambodia-based conglomerate, Prince Group, which it alleges is a "transnational criminal organization."

Treasury alleges that, prior to its designation, the group oversaw a worldwide money-laundering network. Three months earlier, Treasury's 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment warned that professional fraud networks are providing criminals with expertise and economies of scale. That activity is targeting B2B payments in many ways because fraudsters are helping each other. Banks and their PSP partners are banding together to share fraud intelligence and fight back against this new cooperative fraud typology. For a better sense of the trend, we're delighted to welcome Dalit Amitai, Head of Product and Technology, Cyberfraud and Risk Management at Bottomline.

Dalit Amitai, you are most welcome back to The Payments Podcast.

Dalit Amitai: Hey, Owen. Great to be here. I'm excited to talk about sharing intelligence, fraud intelligence. Fraudsters love hiding in gaps, and consortia help us connect those gaps and see the bigger fraud picture.

Owen McDonald: So, Dalit, fraudsters increasingly operate as coordinated international business networks, often using AI to make their attacks faster and more convincing. How are they exploiting the fact that banks still tend to defend commercial payments within their own institutional silos?

Dalit Amitai: The challenge is, Owen, that fraudsters don't think in terms of Bank A, Bank B, or Bank C. Right. They think about the entire banking system.

Owen McDonald: Right.

Dalit Amitai: Let me give you an example. The fraudsters will open a fraudulent account and then start targeting payers at multiple banks. Maybe Bank A figures out that the account is bad, but Bank B and C don't know that. If that information about the bad account isn't shared, payments can still be sent to the same account from another institution. Sharing such information across banks that an account is fraudulent will help all participants in the consortium. I hope this makes sense.

Owen McDonald: It does indeed. It sounds dead on, in fact. Now, banks have historically been reluctant to share fraud information because of reputational, legal, and competitive concerns. What is changing that mindset, Dalit, and why is collaboration becoming more important in protecting business customers from organized crime?

Dalit Amitai: Honestly, their hesitation was completely understandable. No bank likes to admit that they're being attacked. Right?

Owen McDonald: Right.

Dalit Amitai: There are concerns about reputational damage, about customer confidence. Another very important concern, of course, is protecting sensitive data. Information about fraud, if we were to share it, includes account numbers and personal data. The last thing a bank needs is for information related to fraud incidents to create additional risk or become public. 

And you asked, what is changing? What is changing the mindset? What's changed is really the threat landscape, the fraud landscape. Fraudsters have become much more sophisticated, like you mentioned before, AI is accelerating the trend. Things like impersonation attacks, deep fakes, spoofed websites, and super highly personalized social campaigns are becoming so easy and cheap for criminals to execute.

So banks understand that this is no longer a fight that they can win on their own. Fraudsters are collaborating, like you mentioned. It's a network. They share tools. They share techniques. And to get the upper hand back, banks need to do the same.

Owen McDonald: Right. It makes perfect sense. I'm almost a little surprised it hasn't happened before now, but we'll get to that. Many established fraud information networks were designed around consumer or person-to-person payments. Why do commercial payments present a different intelligence challenge, Dalit?

What risks can be missed when banks lack visibility into B2B payer and payee activity?

Dalit Amitai: That's a great question, Owen. And I think the key point is that, just as fraud detection isn't one-size-fits-all, fraud consortiums aren't one-size-fits-all either. So many existing networks today are built around consumer and person-to-person payments, and they do a great job in this space. 

But commercial payments are different. The relationships are different. The transaction values are different. The transaction volumes are different, and the risk patterns are also different. So, at a very simple level, a consortium helps answer the question, "What do we know about this account? But if I'm a business, right, I'm a business, and I'm paying another business, I will not catch much value from shared intelligence that covers consumer accounts. I'm dealing with a completely different ecosystem.

Owen McDonald: So it's that simple, in other words.

Dalit Amitai: If a business wants to send a payment to a supplier for the first time. Right? That's the example. The bank wants to understand whether the payee looks legitimate. Are we moving money, sending money to a legitimate account?

Owen McDonald: Right.

Dalit Amitai: They want to know if other institutions saw suspicious activity associated with that account, and this is where a specifically focused commercial payments, business payments consortium will have that intelligence.

Owen McDonald: I'm very curious. I want to drill down on that. What are some real-world fraud schemes that banks would most likely miss on their own, but that become visible when institutions collaborate through the kind of fraud consortium you're describing?

Dalit Amitai: So, actually, multiple value points or use cases where the consortium will help. I gave the example before of just sharing the fraudulent accounts, a list of fraudulent accounts, but I want to give another example. Fraudsters know how detection works. They are smart. So they are very good at staying below the radar.

Let's say that a bank typically pays close attention to payments over $10,000. If I'm a fraudster and I'm trying to steal $100,000, I'm not going to take it from one customer at one bank. I'll take 10,000 from 10 different customers at 10 different banks and send it all to the same account. So when every bank looks in its own system, nothing looks unusual. But if we zoom out and we look across the network, it's obvious that there's a coordinated attack happening.

That's just one example. But there are other advantages or unique value propositions that really come from sharing intelligence. A lot of it is focusing obviously on catching fraud, but a consortium provides additional context. 

So, one big challenge is that fraud detection usually comes with a lot of false positives. Just because a payment looks suspicious doesn't mean that it is fraudulent. Right? And every time a legitimate payment is stopped or delayed, it creates friction for customers who just want to run their business. Right? If I'm buying a property and this is an unusual payment, it is suspicious, but it's legitimate.

Owen McDonald: Sure.

Dalit Amitai: So this broader view helps separate real fraud from activity that might seem unusual at first, but is actually legitimate. Because if the consortium is familiar with the account, if other banks saw the account and they see the account and familiar with it for say, three years, and we know that six banks are familiar with it for six years, it gives the level of confidence that this is a valid account and removes the risk, reduces the number of false positives, and the friction with customers. So the other benefit is really an operational benefit. Most banks, they have highly skilled fraud analysts that spend their days investigating suspicious payments. The more false positives that the solutions generate, the larger those teams need to be, right?

It comes with a cost. So with a consortium, it will improve the accuracy of alerting, and it will help investigators spend their time investigating the highest risk cases instead of reviewing a large volume of legitimate activity. So the consortium helps in many, many ways.

Owen McDonald: I hadn't planned on asking this, but can I ask you to quickly describe, within the context of what you just said, Bottomline's new service, which is known as Fraud Intelligence Exchange? Doesn't it address these very things? I believe it does. Right?

Dalit Amitai: It does. And, really, the main and the first use case that we're planning to offer is what we call pay intelligence. So, in the first example I gave, fraudulent accounts will definitely be shared among participants in the network. But the other value is that we can provide what we call account insights or account risk indicators. Those will be about payment patterns and the augmented legitimacy of the account.

The pattern, the date range of activity, the more we know about the account, the better it is for the participants and the more confidence they can get about good accounts. So the value is not limited to alerting only on fraudulent accounts, but also on good accounts that will help banks reduce the friction and improve operational efficiency.

Owen McDonald: Right. It sounds like the perfect thing for the moment that we're experiencing. Last question. My goodness. This has gone quickly.

Recent developments, including FinCEN's updated Section 314 (B) Guidance in the U.S. and European payment service reforms are placing greater emphasis on fraud information sharing. Dalit, how will this affect commercial CFRM teams, and what safeguards around anonymization, encryption, data governance, and permitted use are necessary for banks to collaborate with confidence? 

Dalit Amitai: I think these regulatory changes are important because they're sending a very clear message. Fraud intelligence sharing is no longer viewed as a nice-to-have. It's becoming a critical part of the industry, and it's a global trend. Right?

For commercial payments teams, it means that they can move beyond looking at what is only happening within their own bank. That's really what we see here, and I will need to repeat myself a little bit if it's okay. 

Owen McDonald: Please.

Dalit Amitai: Thank you. So this is important. Instead of investigating suspicious payments within a limited context, banks can make a decision based on signals that they see across institutions. So they can improve fraud detection, reduce false positives, and help investigators focus on alerts the three d matter. And you did ask about technology and about handling data, the right way. Right? 

Owen McDonald: You're right.

Dalit Amitai: None of those really work unless banks trust the way data is being handled. Right? We need to have safeguards. Data should be shared in a way that will protect privacy. We have strong encryption, clear governance, and strict controls on who has access to the information.

Banks are also asking for transparency into what data is being contributed and what data is being consumed. They need to know that to have assurance, really, that participating participants are operating within clearly defined regulatory and legal frameworks. That's super critical and super important. Because at the end of the day, banks do not want to share data. They want to share intelligence.

This is the distinction. The goal is not to expose customer information. The goal is to help institutions identify risky accounts and suspicious patterns.

Owen McDonald: So it's an important distinction and, clearly, we talk about zooming out and looking at the big picture, and that's kind of what this does and allows you to connect the dots as it were. Right? That's what it sounds like.

Dalit Amitai: Exactly. And also, while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security, if you combine this strong governance with modern technology, then the conflict between sharing data, right, and not sharing it is resolved because you get the value, but you're not risking the sensitive data.

Owen McDonald: That's right. That's right. 

And there you have it. As organized crime takes a consortium-style approach to fraud, banks, corporates, and their PSP partners are striking back with new forms of cooperation, leaving the bad guys with fewer places to hide. That's the objective in any case, and collaboration offers a way to scale it and turn the tide.

Sincere thanks again to Bottomline's Dalit Amitai for her razor-sharp insights. To our audience, the smartest people in B2B payments, thanks for listening. Hit subscribe. Catch us again on your favorite podcast platforms, including Apple, Spotify, Blubrry, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. Bye for now.

The Payments Podcast from Bottomline.