Hosting Salv ’s round-table last week felt a bit like switching the lights on in a room most people never get to see, a room where the people who carry the weight of financial crime finally put that weight down for a moment and speak plainly.

There’s something special that happens when you sit a criminologist, MLRO’s, data scientist’s, a product owner’s, a founder, frontline investigator’s & fraud leaders around a table with food, wine, and an unspoken pact to be honest. The stories stop sounding like case studies and start sounding like real human experiences. The jargon drops away. And suddenly you find yourself inside the emotional, cultural, technical and moral machinery that actually keeps fraud prevention work alive.

What struck me, again, is that this industry is full of people doing unbelievably complex work with almost no space to admit how complex it really is. Often with very little support.

One person talked about inheriting responsibility for twelve million customers, a trillion daily transactions, and a fraud budget that grew by ten million a year yet never felt enough. Another described joining a bank where the first line didn’t even know how to identify a victim, let alone differentiate fraud from AML. Someone else described being the deputy MLRO “the most poisoned chalice of all” forced to carry personal liability built on information they can’t guarantee is complete.

And still others brought stories that sound like Netflix scripts: Chinese students losing £100,000 through WeChat “agents”; chefs recruited as mules; espionage cases with private investigators and intimidation tactics poured through a letterbox at 3am; fraudsters who complain to CEOs as a tactic; fake translators who are actually handlers; crypto scams indistinguishable from legitimate trading; and yes – piles of hundreds of fraudulently obtained bank cards turning up in documentary investigations like a deck of playing cards.

What united all of these wasn’t the technical difficulty. It was the isolation.

Across fintechs, banks and vendors, people kept describing the same experience: holding accountability with limited information, drowning in email trails, fighting for data from merchants who don’t want to give it, arguing for controls product teams don’t want to build, and trying to explain to colleagues that criminals are operating with more money, more speed, and more coordination than ever before.

Fraud prevention as an industry is like no other – we aren’t racing other financial institutions. Our competitors aren’t other banks or fintechs. We are racing people who have no rules, no friction, and no shortage of time. We’re racing organisations whose scalability makes even the biggest fintechs look small. And we’re racing an ecosystem where a single misplaced assumption, about data, culture, UX, or user behaviour, becomes a point of entry for exploitation.

But the part I keep thinking about from last night isn’t the horror stories. It’s the honesty.

It’s someone admitting they cried at work because cultural hierarchy made progress impossible. Someone else confessing they’re still not sure how their company will cope when new products launch faster than controls. Someone realising that, in a 10-second world, we’ve outsourced judgement to automation without ever resolving what “good judgement” even means. Someone asking whether regulation is creating more spaghetti than structure. Someone pointing out that AI only has to get it right once, but humans have to get it right always.

When people talk about “transformation” or “resilience” in financial crime, this is what it actually looks like. Not dashboards. Not slogans. Not shiny use cases. But the quiet, difficult work of people trying to keep criminals out of systems that were never designed to withstand this level of pressure.

And yet, for all of that, the room was bright. There was humour. There was empathy. There was a real sense of shared purpose. The more people spoke, the less alone they sounded. You could feel the temperature change from “my problem” to “our problem”.

And that, to me, is the real story here.

Financial crime isn’t going anywhere. Instant payments, AI-enabled social engineering, synthetic identities, globalised laundering routes, none of this is slowing down. But neither is the collective intelligence in rooms like this. The industry doesn’t lack knowledge. It lacks places where that knowledge can be spoken without performance.

Last night reminded me why I do this work. Not because fraud is fascinating (though it is). Not because criminals are inventive (though they are). But because when you strip everything back, the KPIs, the press releases, the compliance theatre, the posturing, what’s left is a group of people who genuinely care about preventing harm. People who are fighting for victims who will never know their names. People who keep going even when it’s lonely, overwhelming, or absurd.

This wasn’t a networking dinner. It was a community forming in real time.

And maybe the most important thing we can do, as this landscape accelerates, is to create more rooms like that – rooms where people can talk without fear, challenge without posturing, and share the kinds of truths that never make it into a whitepaper. Many thanks for Salv founder and CEO Taavi Tamkiviand his fantastic team for making it happen. One thing is for sure:

Criminals collaborate. So are we.

Written by Dr Nicola Harding, Founder of The Financial Crime Lab

“If you would like to have a conversation about how I can help, please drop me a message. I would love to talk”