Proactive Fraud Prevention for EU Finance in the Age of AI

Proactive fraud prevention is not an aspiration but the norm for EU financial institutions in a hyper-evolving threat landscape. This paper examines why today's fragmented fraud defences leave critical blind spots, and how intelligence-led, converged approaches across Fraud, AML, and Cyber can stop fraud before it reaches the transaction.

Embedded in this paper, a fraud exposure calculator helps you quantify the gap between what your books record and what your fraud controls are already signalling, before your next budget conversation.

Fraud in numbers

Most European banks are fighting fraud with infrastructure that was built for a different problem. They’re detecting fraud that has already happened by reviewing transactions, filing suspicious activity reports, and reimbursing customers after funds have cleared.

That model has three compounding problems.

First, the 15-minute crime window: funds are typically unrecoverable before the detection system triggers.

Second, the PSR liability shift: reimbursement liability moves onto the institution and the standard is prevention, not detection.

Third, the intelligence paradox: every institution is seeing fragments of the same criminal networks, but they can’t share those signals without GDPR exposure, so the criminals operate across institutions that are fighting them independently.

Group-IB’s approach is different. We operate upstream, in the criminal ecosystem, monitoring adversary infrastructure, fraud kit deployment, and mule recruitment before attacks are launched. That intelligence reaches institutions before the transaction, not after.

Who is this Whitepaper for?

Head of Fraud Risk

Your detection tooling is operating at the wrong phase. By the time a transactional anomaly triggers an alert, the criminal has already cleared onboarding, KYC, and the first-transaction check. This whitepaper maps where in the crime lifecycle the highest-probability interceptions actually are.

CISO

Cyber and fraud are the same threat, sourced from the same criminal infrastructure. Phishing kits, compromised credentials, botnet traffic — these aren't fraud department problems or security department problems. They're the same adversary. This whitepaper covers the intelligence fusion model that closes the gap between your teams.

Fraud Operations Analyst

65–80% of your alert queue is false positives. That's not a filter problem — it's an intelligence problem. Pre-scored alerts with adversary context change what you spend your time on. This whitepaper includes the Fraud Matrix: a kill chain for financial crime that gives every alert a phase, an indicator, and a response playbook.

CFO / Risk Officer

PSR Article 83 shifts mandatory reimbursement liability onto the institution which cannot demonstrate active prevention mechanisms. "We detected it" is no longer a defence. This whitepaper maps the liability exposure and includes a Fraud Exposure calculator; your operational estimates, no generic benchmarks.

WHAT'S INSIDE

The Intelligence-Sharing Paradox

why banks can't share fraud signals in time, and the privacy-preserving architecture that resolves it without touching customer PII

The PSR Liability Map

what "demonstrated prevention mechanisms" means legally, and the documentation gap most institutions haven't addressed

The Fraud Matrix

Group-IB's kill chain for financial crime. The MITRE ATT&CK equivalent for fraud operations: phases, indicators, interception points, and more.

The Fragmentation Blind Spot

why siloed fraud, AML, and cyber tooling creates the visibility gap criminals exploit

The criminals coordinate. The banks don't. Every institution is fighting the same criminal networks independently, because the architecture for sharing signals safely didn't exist. Until now.