Five years ago, a fraud analyst in Estonia noticed a phishing pattern spreading through SmartID logins and fired off a warning to a neighbouring bank. Within minutes, an agent at the receiving institution had identified seven matching accounts, keeping €45,000 out of criminal hands that afternoon.
That exchange, on 13 July 2021, was the first message ever sent through Salv Bridge, the collaborative crime-fighting network built by RegTech firm Salv.
Half a decade later, what was once a novel experiment has become daily infrastructure. One mid-sized bank alone has averaged 60 such messages every working day for five years.
Information sharing between banks is nothing new, but historically it happened off the books. Salv CEO and co-founder Taavi Tamkivi said, “Fincrime fighters compare notes over coffee, or send a ‘you might want to take a look at this customer’ message to a former colleague. That’s suspicion passed on quickly, with good intentions. But quietly, informally, and outside policy.”
The gap Bridge set out to close was structural. Each institution ran its own defences in isolation, meaning a customer flagged as high risk at one bank could appear entirely clean at the next. What was missing was a fast, secure and compliant channel for institutions to see what their neighbours already knew.
Notably, Bridge did not emerge from a technology roadmap but from a customer’s dilemma: the bank knew it held information valuable to a peer, yet had no compliant route to pass it on. That request grew into a pilot, and the pilot into a network. Its first serious stress test arrived when Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions cases quadrupled almost overnight, a surge the network absorbed.
From its origins with four Estonian banks, Swedbank, SEB, Luminor and LHV, Bridge now spans institutions across more than 16 countries, including a dedicated cross-border cluster serving a pan-European and UK FinTech group. Some markets replicated Estonia’s bank-led model; others arrived via national banking associations acting as the connecting body.
The numbers underline the scale. Banks on the network have collaborated on more than 75,000 joint investigations across fraud, sanctions and AML, alongside over 200,000 joint screening queries. Fraud cases shared through Bridge carry an 84% true-positive rate, the median inter-bank response time stands at 17 minutes, and roughly 80% of cases achieve at least partial fund recovery.
Regulation is now catching up. Salv’s 2022 whitepaper predicted EU-wide mandatory data sharing as early as 2024. That proved optimistic on timing, but not direction: AMLR Article 75 introduces mandatory AML information sharing from July 2027, while PSR Article 83a is expected to do the same for fraud from early 2028.
Coop Pank sanctions and CTF officer Siiri Grabbi said, “Bridge proves that collaboration works. It helps us respond faster, protect more customers and, most importantly, build trust between people who once worked in isolation. Every message shared strengthens that trust. Every quick response shows why it matters. When people know the person on the other side, cooperation becomes instinctive. The best operation is cooperation!”
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
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