The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of UK Finance or its members.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates 4.2 million fraud incidents in the year to September 2025. An estimated 70% of fraud has an international dimension, with organised crime groups, and in some instances, hostile state actors exploiting our payment systems. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Each case carries a human cost that extends far beyond the money lost: 86% of victims report anger, 73% experience stress, and in the most tragic cases, lives are lost. This is not a problem that better detection or reimbursement can solve alone.

Beyond the balance sheet

The financial services sector has invested heavily in fraud prevention. Banks prevented £870 million of unauthorised fraud in H1 2025 – equivalent to stopping 70p in every £1 attempted.   Yet reimbursement does not undo the harm, restore a victim’s trust or disrupt the criminal networks that funnel proceeds into wider organised crime. 

The industry’s focus is rightly shifting from recovery to prevention, and from prevention to disruption. That requires seeing fraud not as isolated incidents to be managed, but as a systemic threat to be dismantled.

Powering prevention

Technology is central to this shift, but not in the way it is often discussed. The focus tends to be on detection: AI models, behavioural analytics, and real-time monitoring. These are crucial, but the real bottleneck can be in what happens next.

Too often, alerts sit in queues and investigation teams work in silos, disconnected from the systems that flagged the risk in the first place. The gap between detecting fraud and acting on it is where criminals thrive. 

Closing that gap requires integrated workflows that connect detection tools with investigation teams, ensuring high-risk cases are prioritised and resolved before money moves. Strengthening digital identity verification adds another layer, helping to stop fraud at the point of entry. The most powerful shift is agentic AI – systems that don't just surface risk but act on it, autonomously driving cases forward, freeing investigators to focus where human judgment matters most.  This operational layer is often overlooked, but it determines whether technology delivers outcomes or simply generates noise.

Fighting in the light

Criminals share intelligence in the shadows.  They collaborate across borders, exploit gaps between institutions, and adapt faster than any single organisation can respond.  To outpace them, the industry must fight in the light – with transparency, shared intelligence and collective action.

No single institution or sector can solve this alone.  With 66% of APP fraud cases originating online and 17% via telecommunications networks, banks are often the last line of defence, expected to stop threats that have already passed through multiple other touchpoints unchecked.

Initiatives like Stop Scams UK show what is possible when intelligence flows across sector boundaries in real-time.  But making this operational at scale is not straightforward.  Sectors operate under different regulatory structures, building confidence within large organisations takes time, and without clear feedback loops it is difficult to demonstrate and sustain the ROI of cross-sector collaboration.  What is needed now is the deliberate design to embed real-time intelligence into workflows so that every sector can act, not just detect.

The Government's Fraud Strategy 2026-2029, published this month, commits £250 million to a system-wide response built on disruption, prevention and cross-sector collaboration – a clear signal that shared responsibility is now government policy, not just industry aspiration. Now the work of turning that commitment into operational reality begins, and closing the gap between detection and action, within and across organisations, is how we turn shared intelligence into prevented fraud.

Restoring trust

Ultimately this is about people – protecting consumers, restoring confidence in digital payments and denying criminals the proceeds that fund wider harm.

In the fight against fraud, technology and collaboration are our strongest defence.  The mission is human: a financial system that people can trust.  The question is no longer whether the industry can connect to protect.  It is whether it will.