By
ANZ has participated in international trials led by Swift that doubled fraud detection rates in cross-border payments, using artificial intelligence and privacy-preserving technologies tested on 10 million transactions.
The initiative involved 13 global financial institutions, including ANZ, BNY and Intesa Sanpaolo, alongside technology partners such as Google Cloud. According to Swift, the trials demonstrated that institutions could securely share fraud-related intelligence across borders, enabling suspicious activity to be detected in minutes rather than days.
The experiments applied privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to allow banks to confirm suspicious accounts in real time. In another scenario, PETs were combined with federated learning, an AI model that trains locally on each institution’s data without exposing customer details. Trained on synthetic data from 10 million test transactions, the model proved twice as effective at identifying known fraud cases compared with a model trained on a single institution’s dataset.
Swift’s head of AI, Rachel Levi, said the results reinforced the importance of collaboration among financial institutions.
“These experiments demonstrate the convening power of Swift as a trusted cooperative at the heart of global finance. A united, industry-wide fraud defence will always be stronger than one put up by a single institution acting alone. The industry loses billions to fraud each year, but by enabling the secure sharing of intelligence across borders we’re paving the way for this figure to be significantly reduced, and allowing fraud to be stopped in a matter of minutes, not hours or days,” said Levi.
ANZ also noted the scale of the problem and the role of emerging technology in addressing it. “The rise in fraud and scams is a global issue impacting all financial institutions,” said David Buckthought, head of technology – payment services and digital assets at ANZ. “ANZ is excited to be involved in an industry-wide response, proving the use of federated learning to enhance detection capabilities. This will provide banks with a stronger defence against fraudulent activity.”
Other participating banks also stressed the value of a shared response. According to Isabel Schmidt, executive Platform Owner at BNY: “Security is paramount in cross-border payments. Using the latest technologies, this group has achieved results that show how these tools can be used to uplift the entire ecosystem and demonstrate the value of the Swift co-operative in bringing competitive organisations together behind a greater good, while driving standards in security and enhancing the experience of all stakeholders.”
Meanwhile, Intesa Sanpaolo pointed to the costs of fraud across the sector.
“Fraud in cross-border payments increases friction in the ecosystem and causes significant costs at an industry level,” said Enrico Canna, head of anti-fraud and customer protection centre. “Intesa Sanpaolo is collaborating in these preliminary experiments led by Swift to demonstrate the positive impact of a synergistic approach supported by the latest technologies for making the ecosystem more secure and reliable.”
Swift said it will invite more institutions to take part in a second phase of testing using real transaction data to assess the technology’s performance in live environments. The organisation estimated that financial crime cost the global industry $485 billion in 2023.
