BLOG

Biggest gap, smallest budget: UK financial crime’s data-sharing problem

UK financial crime leaders see AI fraud accelerating faster than controls, while data sharing remains a major challenge but an investment gap.

The UK’s financial crime leaders know the emerging threats coming over the next year; however, they are not yet resourced to meet them.

That is the thread running through the UK financial crime pulse 2026 report, published in advance of The Payments Association’s Finactualcrime360 conference. TPA surveyed 100 senior decision-makers in financial crime, fraud, risk and compliance on what they have faced in the past 12 months and where the money goes next.

Threats are moving faster than controls. Guidance is arriving after the spend it should direct. And the one fix respondents ask for most is the one almost nobody is funding.

What the data says

AI-enabled fraud is the risk moving fastest. Of the 41 respondents who encountered it, 76% say it is increasing faster than their organisation can respond – the sharpest response gap of any risk tested, and well clear of Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud on 56%.
Exposure is near-universal, but nothing dominates. 92% faced at least one financial crime risk in the past year. Only 20 percentage points separate [the most and least experienced risk](link to bill link) on the list. Most functions are managing several exposures at once, not defending one headline threat.
Severity and reach are two different findings. 51% rate APP fraud a major challenge, the highest single item. But insider fraud has the widest net: 78% rate it at least a moderate challenge. Anyone citing “the biggest challenge” should say which measure they mean.
Guidance has not kept up. 41% say AI governance is the area of financial crime that most lacks practical implementation guidance across the industry – ahead of crypto compliance on 37%. Meanwhile, 50% will invest in AI fraud prevention over the next 12 months. Payments are moving ahead of the standards meant to direct them.

Every one of those is a problem a firm can act on alone. One finding in this report is not, and it is the one worth putting on the table in full.

Data sharing is named far more than it is funded

Data-sharing limitations are not a fringe concern. 73% of respondents rate them a major or moderate challenge for their financial crime function. Thirty-seven rate them a major challenge outright.

Asked what their organisation is most likely to invest in over the next 12 months, respondents put data-sharing infrastructure last of the options tested, on 19%—while AI fraud prevention took 50% and internal AI governance 38%.

At the respondent level, the gap sharpens. Of the 37 who call data-sharing limitations a major challenge, eight are investing in data-sharing infrastructure. That is 22%, against 18% among everyone else—a four-point difference, well inside the margin where we would claim nothing. Which is the point—believing this is a serious problem barely changes whether you fund the fix.

This is not firms failing to see the problem. It is the classic shape of a collective-action problem. The returns on shared infrastructure land across the industry, while the cost and the build risk land on whoever moves first. Rational at the firm level, and a stall at the industry level.

Given a free-text question on what would benefit most from greater cross-industry collaboration, cross-industry data and intelligence sharing was the most common theme, appearing in 32 of 99 responses, with joint fraud and mule account detection close behind on 31. The two overlap heavily—most respondents describe data sharing not as a principle but as the mechanism for one specific job—spotting mule accounts faster than any single institution can alone.

Read the full findings

UK financial crime pulse 2026 report covers all nine questions in full: risk and pace, severity and operational uncertainty, regulatory pressure and the guidance gap, investment intent, and the collaboration ask—with crossbreaks by organisation type and size, and the verbatims behind the themes.

→ Read the full FC360 report

Or take it further at Financial Crime 360

The report sets out the tensions. Financial Crime 360 is where the industry works out what to do about them — with the practitioners, regulators and policymakers whose decisions determine whether shared infrastructure ever gets built