Guest Authors
Global Signal Exchange
The 2026 Nasdaq Verafin Global Financial Crime Report makes a stark case that scams are escalating at an unprecedented pace and scale. Fraud scam losses reached $62 billion in 2025, growing at 19.3% annually, more than double the rate of bank fraud growth. Total illicit financial activity now stands at an estimated $4.4 trillion. The report’s message is unambiguous: the complexity of today’s threats, coupled with increasingly faster payment channels and porous borders, demands a coordinated response across the public and private sectors, and across industries.
To understand what that looks like in practice, we spoke with Emily Taylor and Lucien Taylor, co-founders of the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), the world’s first independent cross-sector clearinghouse for scam threat signals, established to enable real-time intelligence sharing and support the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA)’s work to coordinate a global, cross-industry response to scams.
The Nasdaq Verafin report describes a financial crime landscape that is growing more organised and interconnected. Does that match what you’re seeing at the GSE?
Completely. What we’re witnessing is not a spike in isolated incidents but a fundamental shift toward organised, cross-border criminal networks operating with deliberate coordination and scale. Criminals are reusing the same digital resources: domains, hosting services, payment rails, communication channels. They share tools and techniques across networks. The fraud you see in one jurisdiction is often connected to infrastructure operating in three or four others.
That’s why the financial sector cannot solve this alone. Banks see the money move, but the scam itself starts much earlier, on a platform, through a phone number, via a fraudulent website. By the time it reaches a financial institution, the victim has often already been compromised. Cross-sector intelligence sharing exists to cover the whole attack chain, not just the financial end of it.
The report calls for collective intelligence as a core operational capability. What does building that infrastructure actually require?
It requires three things working together: trust, governance, and interoperability. Trust, because organisations will only share intelligence if they believe it won’t be misused or create liability. Governance, because clear rules about what can be shared, with whom, and under what conditions are essential. And interoperability, so the signals flowing between organisations are actually useful in the systems people already operate.
We designed the GSE for all three. Organisations are accredited before they join and retain full control over what they share and with whom. The signals themselves are lightweight and portable making them easy to ingest into existing detection systems. One integration gives a participating institution access to more than 50 data sources.
A recent example of how effective the GSE is highlights how a small number of signals shared through the GSE led to the identification of tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts. Can you walk us through how that happens?
That example shows the asymmetry that becomes possible when you join the dots between sectors. Because that platform could see the connections — shared infrastructure, linked accounts, common patterns — what started as a handful of indicators led to the identification and disruption of a network running tens of thousands of fraudulent accounts and thousands of cloned websites.
That force multiplier effect is what makes cross-sector sharing so powerful. Individual organisations are each sitting on fragments of the picture. When those fragments come together in a trusted environment, the picture becomes visible and actionable.
The report is clear that responsibility must extend beyond financial institutions to technology platforms, telecoms, and government. Is that cross-sector engagement happening at the pace the threat demands?
Honestly, it’s uneven. The technology sector has engaged meaningfully. Governments are beginning to join which is a significant shift. Financial institutions understand the need, though many are still navigating the legal and cultural barriers to sharing. Sectors that could contribute enormously such as hosting companies, domain registrars, and telecoms have been slower to engage but there are some encouraging signs with partnerships.
That unevenness is itself a vulnerability. Criminal networks exploit the gaps between sectors precisely because we don’t cover the full attack chain. The Global Financial Crime Report is right to name this as a systemic challenge. Closing those gaps is not just a technical problem, it’s an institutional one that requires leadership at every level, and regulatory frameworks that actively enable collaboration.
What would you say to financial institutions that recognise the need but haven’t yet taken the step of participating in cross-sector intelligence sharing?
It’s important to realize that they don’t need to share everything to benefit. Participating institutions choose what they contribute and can begin with lower-sensitivity signals, threat URLs, for example, while building confidence in the framework at their own pace. They can also participate in small groups at first, and build out to wider sharing from there.
The institutions that have engaged most actively aren’t just contributing to the collective effort. They’re also gaining real operational advantage: one integration, access to more than 90 data sources, real-time signals. In an environment where criminal networks are already moving faster than traditional detection can track, that efficiency matters.
The 2026 Global Financial Crime Report from Nasdaq Verafin, is a clear-eyed assessment of where the threat stands. The tools to respond are improving. What’s needed now is the commitment to use them at scale, and together.
Read the full findings in the 2026 Nasdaq Verafin Global Financial Crime Report including data on the scale of illicit flows, the growing role of AI in financial crime, and the industry’s collective call to action.
About the Authors
Emily Taylor is CEO of Oxford Information Labs and a founder of the Global Signal Exchange. A lawyer by background, she has worked in Internet policy for 25 years. Emily is an associate fellow at Chatham House and former editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy. She has written on disinformation, geopolitics, standards, and emerging technologies. She is a regular commentator on cybersecurity for news and broadcast media, and has given evidence to several parliamentary select committees. Emily’s team advises government on a range of digital policy issues, including the UK’s AI and quantum standards strategy. She is a graduate of Cambridge University and has an MBA from The Open University.
Lucien Taylor is a Co-Founder of the Global Signal Exchange (GSE) and is the CTO of Oxford Information Labs. A technical architect with over 25 years of experience, Lucien specializes in DNS security and the development of collaborative platforms that bridge the gap between big tech, law enforcement, and global NGOs. He leads the technical vision for the GSE, an initiative dedicated to harmonizing cross-sector data sharing to mitigate scams and fraud in real-time. An expert in internet governance and host of the “Cyber Everything” podcast, Lucien holds an MBA and a First Class degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.
