Fighting financial crime alone is no longer an option

Nuno Sebastião, CEO of Feedzai, emphasizes the need for democratising fraud prevention and building financial trust, highlighting how federated learning can bridge technical gaps and encourage cooperation between the private and public sectors

I have spent years working at the intersection of financial systems, technology, and risk. During that time, one reality has become increasingly clear: financial crime has evolved faster than the structures designed to prevent it.

What was once fragmented and opportunistic has become organized, adaptive, and global. Fraud networks today operate across borders, time zones, and platforms with a level of coordination that increasingly resembles that of legitimate enterprises. They share tools, reuse successful tactics, and continuously refine their methods.

From isolated signals to connected intelligence in fraud detection

Financial institutions still tend to detect and manage fraud within their own boundaries. Data is siloed. Signals are isolated. Decisions are often made without the benefit of a broader context. In a system where attackers collaborate and defenders operate alone, the imbalance is structural.

We are no longer facing isolated fraudulent transactions. We are facing coordinated systems of deception that unfold across channels, institutions, and jurisdictions. The risk is being amplified as criminals adopt artificial intelligence, which has lowered the barrier to entry into financial crime. A single event rarely carries enough signal to be understood in isolation. The challenge is no longer simply detecting anomalies. It is connecting them.

Federated intelligence: Learning without sharing data

First, we need to rethink how intelligence is generated and shared. For too long, collaboration in financial crime prevention has been constrained by legitimate concerns around privacy, data sovereignty, and regulation. These constraints remain important. But they no longer justify fragmentation.

It is now possible to learn collectively without exposing sensitive data. Advances in privacy-preserving technologies allow institutions to benefit from shared intelligence while maintaining full control over their information. Patterns of fraud can be identified across networks without moving or centralizing the underlying data. A federated data system can overcome this limitation. This changes the equation.

It means that institutions no longer need to choose between collaboration and compliance. They can strengthen detection capabilities while respecting the legal and ethical frameworks that govern them. More importantly, they can begin to close the information gap that fraudsters have been exploiting for years. But technology alone will not solve the problem.

The second shift is human and organizational. Financial crime does not respect the boundaries we have created within our institutions. Fraud, cybersecurity, compliance, and risk management are often treated as separate disciplines, with different tools, different teams, and different objectives. In reality, they are confronting different facets of the same threat.

Breaking silos, building alignment

The fragmentation of our responses mirrors the fragmentation of our financial organizations. To move forward, we need to create platforms where these perspectives converge, where decision-makers from across disciplines and institutions can share insights, challenge assumptions, and align on priorities. Not as a reactive measure, but as a continuous practice.

The recent Global Fraud Summit organized by UNODC and Interpol in Vienna is a perfect example of such a platform, successfully showing how this collaborative approach can be implemented. Feedzai actively participated in the event, sharing our knowledge and passion for technological innovation in combating fraud and financial crime, and declaring our commitment to the democratization of fraud prevention and support by forging the future of financial trust through two pledges submitted to the United Nations.

This kind of coordination cannot be improvised in the middle of a crisis. It must be built deliberately, through sustained dialogue and shared frameworks of understanding.

Because at its core, financial crime is not just a technical issue. It is a systemic one. It reflects how information circulates, how institutions interact, and how trust is maintained or eroded across the financial ecosystem. If we continue to approach it as a series of isolated incidents, we will continue to fall behind.

The institutions that will lead in this new environment will not be those with the most tools, or even the most data. They will be the ones best connected. Technically, operationally, and strategically.

They will understand that resilience is no longer a function of individual strength, but of collective intelligence. This is the direction we must move toward. We believe the goal should not be simply to reduce fraud losses, but to restore confidence in the systems that underpin our economies. Not only to react faster, but to anticipate better. Not just to protect transactions, but to protect trust itself.