Your fraud team sees transactions. Your cyber team sees logs. Your financial crime team sees patterns.
Criminals? They see all three — and they’re winning.

I keep hearing CISOs, fraud directors, and AML officers talk about their “advanced detection capabilities.”
But when you look closer, these teams often operate in completely different worlds.

Here’s the harsh truth: 60% of fraud executives learn about cyber breaches after the fraud losses have already happened.
And the financial crime team? Usually the last to know that the suspicious transaction they’re investigating started with a stolen credential three days earlier.

Meanwhile, criminals are connecting the dots faster than our organisations can. Your Cyber, Fraud, and AML Teams Are Fighting Different Battles — Against the Same Enemy

3 Blind Spots Created by Siloed Teams:

❌ The Three‑Team Paradox — Your cyber team flags suspicious login attempts. Your fraud team sees unusual transactions 48 hours later. Your financial crime team detects laundering patterns 72 hours after that. Same compromised account. Three separate incidents. Zero coordination. The customer’s already a victim before anyone compares notes.

❌ The Triple Redundancy Tax — All three teams collect the same data: authentication logs, behavioural analytics, transaction data, threat intel. You’re paying three times for overlapping datasets, yet each team has only part of the story. The waste — and missed insight — is staggering.

❌ The Jurisdiction Gap — When an account takeover triggers layered transactions (a textbook laundering red flag), who owns it? Cyber sees the breach. Fraud sees the transfer. Financial crime sees the structuring pattern. Meanwhile, the customer gets bounced between teams while criminals make their exit.

We’re starting to see progress as banks bring fraud and financial crime closer together.
Yet cybersecurity remains isolated — leaving the door open for criminals who already think across all three.

Account takeover attacks jumped 24% last year. Financial institutions need to weave cybersecurity directly into their AML frameworks if they want to close that gap.

Because the convergence is already happening — on the criminal side:

📎 Ransomware payments → laundered through cryptocurrency → results in a SAR filing.
📎 Business email compromise → unauthorised wire transfer → structured below thresholds.
📎 Credential stuffing → account takeover → used for trade‑based money laundering.

And inside most organisations? Three different teams are investigating three different parts of the same crime.

💬 Question for you

Do your fraud, cyber, and financial crime teams share the same incident in the case management system?
Be honest — the answer says more than we’d like to admit.