Topic starter
23/10/2026 12:45 am
TL;DR: Fraud can move through mule accounts and multiple institutions in minutes, according to Feedzai. Real-time payment networks need shared intelligence and faster cross-bank escalation to reconstruct the fund trail before it disappears.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Feedzai: “Vanishing Without A Trace: How Fraud Slips Between Banks”.
By the numbers:
- In the Philippines, Trace coverage reaches around 99% of the national real-time network.
Key questions
Q: Why do real-time payment rails make scam recovery so difficult?
A: Because the fraud moves in minutes, while many response processes still depend on manual review, counterpart outreach, and case-by-case investigation.
Q: How can banks tell whether network-wide fraud sharing is working?
A: Look for whether a confirmed fraud event at one institution produces actionable signals at others before the same funds or accounts are reused.
Q: What fails when payment fraud is investigated only inside one bank?
A: The investigation usually fails at the point where the money leaves the first institution, because the full transfer chain is already distributed across other ledgers.
Practitioner guidance
- Build cross-institution fraud tracing Define how confirmed scam transactions are propagated to partner institutions so the next hops can be traced before funds disappear into new ledgers.
- Standardise mule-account signals Use common confidence levels, transaction descriptors, and escalation triggers so partner banks can act on the same suspicious account patterns consistently.
- Shorten internal fraud decision cycles Remove handoff delays between detection, investigation, and external notification so the bank does not lose the recovery window while waiting for manual review.
Bottom line: Real-time payment fraud now exploits the gap between how quickly money moves and how slowly many institutions can investigate it.
Glossary terms: Real-Time Payments, Mule Account, Consortium Fraud Intelligence, Network-Level Fraud Intelligence
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This topic was modified 6 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
23/10/2026 9:49 am
Network blind spots are now a fraud-control failure, not just an investigation inconvenience. The article shows that payment fraud exploits the gap between how money moves and how banks observe it. A bank-level view is too narrow when the offence path is distributed across institutions, mule accounts, and ledgers. Practitioner conclusion: fraud defence has to be designed around shared visibility, not isolated recovery.
A few things that frame the scale:
- U.S. fraud losses are projected to reach $40 billion by 2027.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What governance model is needed for consortium fraud defence?
A: Banks need agreed rules for what counts as a suspicious signal, how confidence is expressed, and when an observation becomes actionable across members. Without those governance rules, shared intelligence either stays too vague to help or becomes noisy enough that institutions stop trusting it.
👉 Read our full editorial: Network-level fraud defence is closing real-time payment blind spots
This post was modified 6 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group