NetGuardians enhances fraud, scam and money mule detection through compatibility with EBA clearing’s FPAD initiative

Yverdon-les-Bains, 30 April 2025: NetGuardians, a global leader in financial crime prevention, has announced that its solutions are now compatible with EBA CLEARING’s Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection (FPAD) initiative.

This strategic move by NetGuardians comes amidst rising pressure on banks to outpace criminal networks that exploit siloed systems and sophisticated scams—making intelligent, collaborative fraud detection more essential than ever. The new compatibility strengthens NetGuardians’ ability to help tackle this challenge, boosting scam and fraud detection capabilities for financial institutions across Europe.

Listed as an official FPAD solution provider by EBA CLEARING, NetGuardians leverages a powerful combination of community-driven insights and advanced AI models. The integration of FPAD indicators into NetGuardians’ solutions offers financial institutions an additional layer of intelligence, enhancing the accuracy of fraud detection and reducing false positives as institutions respond to rising scam and fraud threats.

By combining collective insights with smart, actionable detection, NetGuardians’ FPAD compatibility unlocks the full potential of intelligence sharing at scale. Unlike generic platforms, NetGuardians integrates FPAD indicators directly into its ready-to-use AI models. This seamless integration, powered by the collective intelligence of a connected community, transforms insights into a powerful scoring capability.

The move also comes at a time of increasing regulatory pressure. In the UK, the introduction of a liability shift for authorised push payment (APP) fraud has placed greater responsibility on financial institutions to protect customers. Meanwhile, across Europe, upcoming regulations such as PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation (PSR) look set to raise the bar further, mandating stronger fraud detection capabilities and customer protections.

Commenting on the development, Sandy Lavorel, Head of Fraud Intelligence at NetGuardians, said: “Fraud detection is inherently complex — it demands rich intelligence on the beneficiary and the power of a network-wide view smartly leveraged by AI. Our Community Scoring & Intelligence solution already delivers on this through collaborative insights. With FPAD, we’re adding a new dimension of intelligence, enhancing our ability to detect fraud in real time.

At NetGuardians, we understand that it takes a network to defeat a network of criminals. That’s why our solutions are built to revolutionise the way financial institutions fight fraud, scams, and money mules. By harnessing the collective intelligence of a connected community and turning it into a powerful scoring engine, we dramatically strengthen the industry’s ability to detect and prevent financial crime with greater speed and precision.”

Introduced in 2023, FPAD is a pan-European initiative focused on delivering real-time tools for fraud prevention and detection. It comprises two key elements. The first is the introduction of an IBAN verification check, which is expected to operate in a similar manner to the UK’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP) scheme. This approach has proven effective in introducing friction that discourages customers from falling victim to fraud.

The second element is the development of a fraud detection model designed to assess the probability of fraud based on historical performance and the attributes found within payment messages. Together, these elements aim to support users of STEP2 and RT1 systems by enhancing their individual risk assessments with insights into broader fraud patterns and anomalies observed at the central infrastructure level.

Designed to enhance—not replace—existing fraud detection tools and processes, FPAD provides valuable external indicators that strengthen and support the efforts of individual Payment Service Providers (PSPs). Through this integration, NetGuardians has positioned itself as a leader in the future of fraud prevention across Europe, playing its part in empowering the region with a stronger, smarter defence against scams and fraud.

For more information about NetGuardians’ involvement with FPAD and its advanced fraud prevention solutions, please visit: https://netguardians.ch/

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