Swift has reported strong results from a series of AI-driven experiments designed to accelerate fraud detection in international payments, highlighting the potential of cross-border collaboration to reduce financial crime.
Working alongside 13 major financial institutions, the cooperative tested how privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could be used to securely share intelligence on fraud without exposing sensitive data. In one trial, PETs allowed participants to confirm information on suspicious accounts in real time, enabling banks to identify complex international crime networks and block fraudulent transactions before they were executed.
Another test combined PETs with federated learning, an AI technique that enables models to train locally on institutional data without it leaving the organisation. The model was built on synthetic data representing 10m transactions between participants and proved twice as effective at spotting known fraud compared with a model trained only on one bank’s dataset.
Swift head of AI Rachel Levi said, “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.”
Following these tests, Swift plans to extend participation before beginning a second phase using real transaction data to assess the impact on live fraud detection.
The organisation has been investing heavily in AI and currently has more than 50 use cases across proofs of concept, pilots and active deployment. Earlier this year, it launched an AI-enhanced Payments Controls Service designed to help smaller banks and financial institutions flag potentially fraudulent payments in real time. Industry estimates suggest financial crime cost the sector around $485bn in 2023, making fraud prevention a critical area of innovation.
Participants in the project included ANZ, BNY and Intesa Sanpaolo, alongside technology partner Google Cloud. ANZ head of technology – payment services and digital assets David Buckthought said, “The rise in fraud and scams is a global issue impacting all financial institutions. 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.”
BNY executive platform owner Isabel Schmidt said, “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 organizations together behind a greater good, while driving standards in security and enhancing the experience of all stakeholders.”
Intesa Sanpaolo head of anti-fraud & customer protection centre Enrico Canna said, “Fraud in cross-border payments increases friction in the ecosystem and causes significant costs at an industry level. 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 has positioned itself at the centre of industry efforts to modernise payment security, using AI to create shared defences that go beyond what individual institutions can achieve alone.
Keep up with all the latest RegTech news here
Copyright © 2025 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
