TrustSphere
 

Mule herding is not an incidental feature of fraud; it is the logistics industry that makes fraud pay. Every authorised push payment scam, every...

The most expensive mistake in financial crime vendor selection happens after the RFP closes. A shortlist of three to five vendors is selected, each...

The Economic Crime (Anti-Money Laundering) Levy has quietly become a much bigger bill for the largest AML-regulated entities, and TrustSphere's view...

The FATF's fifth round of mutual evaluations is often described as a methodology refresh. TrustSphere's view is that this undersells it badly: the...

Financial crime teams spend as much time moving data between systems and managing workflow as they do on analysis and decision-making. Regulatory...

Refinitiv (the LSEG successor to Thomson Reuters financial data operations) occupies an unusual position in sanctions compliance: it is neither a...

Cross-border money laundering has always been a graph problem dressed up as a transaction problem. The illicit value moves through layered correspondent relationships, shell entities, money mules and nested accounts — but the typical transaction-monitoring system still scores each payment more or less in isolation. In 2026, that gap is finally closing, and the institutions closing it first are getting a step-change in detection quality at materially lower false-positive rates

Authorised Push Payment fraud has cemented itself as the dominant consumer fraud typology in real-time payment markets, overtaking card fraud across the United Kingdom and increasingly identified as a systemic concern in the European Union, Australia and Singapore. The combination of instant settlement, limited recall windows, and the social-engineering sophistication of modern scam playbooks has created a fraud category that traditional rules-based detection was never design

Mule accounts are no longer a peripheral fraud problem. They are the financial circulatory system through which authorised push payment scams, romance fraud, and investment fraud move stolen funds out of victims' reach. As reimbursement liability shifts onto receiving banks, the institutions that solve mule detection at scale will define the new standard for payment-system integrity.

The Financial Action Task Force has long served as the global standard-setter for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing controls. Its periodic typologies reports do more than catalogue criminal methodologies — they signal where regulators worldwide will focus supervisory scrutiny in the months ahead. For compliance leaders at Tier 1 banks, fintechs, and regulated financial institutions, each FATF update is a strategic planning document as much as a technical r

The periodic customer review — the calendar-driven exercise in which a financial institution refreshes KYC and risk data on a low, medium or high c...

The first quarter of 2026 has cemented something fraud teams have argued for years — that money mules are recruited, not born. Recent PSR and HM Treasury consultation papers, alongside live enforcement under the Online Safety Act, have moved the conversation from "make banks find the mules" to "make recruitment platforms stop creating them in the first place." Ofcom's late-2025 priority direction on illegal financial harms, combined with the FCA's January 2026 Dear CEO letter

A bustling urban market serving as a gateway for business expansion. Expanding into new markets can be one of the most exhilarating steps a business can take. Not only does it offer new opportunities, but it also poses a range of challenges. With the globalization of commerce, many businesses seek to broaden their horizons beyond their national boundaries. Whether you are a startup or an established brand, understanding the basics of market expansion is essential for reaching

In today's digital age, fraud has escalated to unprecedented levels, impacting businesses and individuals alike. As technology evolves,...

Expanding your business globally can be one of the most rewarding yet challenging endeavors you will face. As markets become more...

A quiet legislative milestone in Hong Kong this month may prove to be one of the most transformative anti-financial crime initiatives in...

Hong Kong has long been a titan in global finance, but its latest moves signal a seismic shift toward embracing the digital future. In...

Anti-money-laundering programmes have spent two decades filing suspicious activity reports about transactions that have already moved. The next generation of AML platforms is being designed around a fundamentally different premise — predicting the typology before the payment leaves the bank, and intervening with the same evidentiary rigour required for a SAR.

The post-quantum cryptography conversation in financial services has been led by cyber and infrastructure teams. It needs to be a financial crime conversation too. Sanctions screening, transaction monitoring and customer-data integrity all rely on cryptographic primitives that have a finite shelf life, and the regulators that oversee financial crime programmes are starting to ask how institutions intend to preserve evidentiary integrity through the migration.

Most fraud-prevention investment over the last decade has been at the sending bank. Reimbursement reform has shifted that calculus. With the receiving bank now sharing liability for APP-style scams across the UK, EU and an expanding set of Asia-Pacific markets, mule detection at the receive side is becoming a strategic capability rather than a back-office check. The institutions that build it well will see fewer cases, better customer outcomes and lower exposure.