Asia-Pacific is a global leader in real-time payments and is expected to nearly double its cross-border payment volumes to $24 trillion by 2033. As a result, money movement is getting faster, more connected and more accessible — creating an attractive environment for payments fraud to further take root. As payment systems accelerate, financial crime is evolving just as quickly, becoming more coordinated, scalable and harder to detect.
Financial institutions and payment networks have limited visibility to see how fraud moves across institutions, payment rails and counterparties in real time. As payment infrastructure and jurisdictions become more connected, fraud must be addressed at the network level.
Networked Crime – Siloed Defense
Criminal networks are operating like multinational enterprises, coordinating activity across borders and channels. Their schemes are increasingly industrialized and scalable, often accelerated by AI and automation, while funds move through interconnected payment systems and mule networks in near real time.
As highlighted in the 2026 Global Financial Crime Report, illicit financial activity has reached epidemic proportions:
- Globally – 2025:
- $4.4 trillion in illicit financial flows
- $579.4 billion in fraud losses
- $482.9 billion linked to cross-border illicit activity
- Asia-Pacific – 2025:
- $1.4 trillion in illicit financial flows
- $235 billion in fraud losses
As payment systems across Southeast Asia become faster, more interoperable and more cross-border, fraud must be viewed as a network problem taking place on a global scale.
Why Current Approaches Fall Short
Even as institutions invest in stronger detection models and controls, fraud continues to scale. Criminal activity can be missed as traditional detection approaches are limited to the information within a single institution.
A transaction may appear legitimate in isolation, with the payee simply representing an unknown risk. However, an authorized payment does not reveal the hidden influences of social engineering, deepfakes, business email compromise or host of other scams lifted directly from a fraudster’s playbook. It is only when these signals are viewed across institutions and transactions that the broader pattern becomes visible.
Viewed at a network level, the repeated use of the same mule networks, rapid movement between accounts and inconsistencies between originator and beneficiary behavior will begin to emerge. Without that broader view, detection happens too late — often after funds have already moved.
This is particularly critical in real-time payment environments, where response windows are measured in sub-seconds, not minutes or hours.
Regulators Are Moving Toward Network-Level Defense
Across Southeast Asia and adjacent Asia-Pacific markets, regulators are increasingly arriving at the same conclusion: payments fraud can no longer be addressed through siloed institution controls alone.
- Singapore’s shared responsibility model expands accountability across banks and telecommunications providers.
- Hong Kong’s anti-fraud measures emphasize bank-to-bank information sharing, use of anti-fraud database Scameter data and network analytics to detect mule activity.
- Philippines’ new rules target mule accounts, social engineering, real-time fraud monitoring, transaction pattern detection and account freezing
- South Korea is moving toward faster suspicious-account freezes and information-sharing systems.
- Japan’s evolving cybersecurity and payments supervision underscores the need for stronger digital resilience as payment rails expand.
Taken together, these developments point to a clear regulatory direction: from siloed controls to shared intelligence, from post-event detection to real-time intervention and from single-transaction monitoring to network-level risk analysis.
Consortium Intelligence
Leading institutions are moving beyond transaction-level monitoring toward a model built on network-level intelligence, pre-transaction risk assessment and cross-institutional collaboration.
A consortium-based approach expands visibility across originators, beneficiaries and counterparties, making it possible to detect patterns no single institution can identify alone and support real-time decisions based on risk.
By leveraging insights from hundreds of millions of counterparties, institutions can identify payor–payee inconsistencies in real time, detect suspicious payment relationships before funds move and apply risk scoring across the full transaction journey.
The Path Forward
The next phase of fraud prevention requires infrastructure built for collaboration.
That means leveraging consortium data frameworks that preserve privacy while enabling insight, embedding real-time risk scoring directly into payment flows and strengthening cross-institutional investigation and response capabilities.
Southeast Asia is at a critical point: as payment infrastructure and consumer expectations accelerate, fraud is evolving just as quickly. Those that move now can shift from fragmented defenses to coordinated intelligence — and help define the future of payments security across this region.
For further insights from Nasdaq Verafin, read the 2026 Global Financial Crime Report.
About the Author
MAURICEO CASTANHEIRO
VP – Head, International Payments Fraud, Nasdaq Verafin
Mauriceo Castanheiro (CFE, CAMS) is the Head of International Payments Fraud at Nasdaq Verafin with over two decades of experience combating fraud in the financial sector. In his senior advisory role at Nasdaq Verafin, Mauriceo collaborates with global banks, including Tier 1 institutions, financial industry partners, and key influencers, strengthening Nasdaq Verafin’s reputation as a thought leader and fostering industry-wide cooperation. Having held pivotal positions in fraud management at several of Canada’s largest banks, encompassing roles in business intelligence, operations, analytics, and strategy, Mauriceo offers extensive expertise to Nasdaq Verafin and contributes significantly to the development of innovative solutions for financial crime prevention.
