Preventing online fraud is not a sprint or a marathon. It is a relay race, and right now, Australia’s team is particularly weak when it comes to passing the baton.
This week’s Financial Crime & Fraud Technology Summit 2026 held in Sydney by Clutch Events explored the many roles different organisations play in preventing online financial crime.
Each plays its part to the best of their ability, but collectively, one deficiency emerged repeatedly – the difficulty of sharing information quickly and effectively between participants.
This places defenders at a significant disadvantage.
Cyber criminals have a singular objective – to defraud individuals or corporations for as much money as possible in the least amount of time. It matters nothing to them whether their actions traverse multiple digital platforms, telecommunications services, or financial service providers. Their target is their target, and everything else is a means of reaching this target.
For the defenders however, each plays a specific role that covers only one component of the attack chain. Defeating that criminal activity requires a coordinated approach along the entire chain, and this is clearly missing.
Attackers work at machine speed across the entire attack. Defenders work at machine speed only when it comes to their specific role.
Coordination between those roles, and specifically the transmission of intelligence between those roles, happens at a much slower speed.
Among the most consequential presentations of the day were those delivered by representatives of the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX), addressing the incoming Scams Prevention Framework (SPF) and the need for greater intelligence sharing between banks, telecommunications providers, and digital platform providers. The SPF places greater responsibility on these organisations to prevent and disrupt scams, while the AFCX, as an independent, member-funded organisation, plays an important role in facilitating intelligence sharing between participants.
For the emerging regime to be effective however, participants must commit sufficient funding, resources, and expertise to building the capabilities needed to share and act upon intelligence. And that funding must create a capability that extends across the entire value chain – including the many smaller participants.
Ultimately, it requires a coordinated defence that acts almost as a single, coordinated response. And it will require that response to occur at machine speed. Anything less will leave gaps that will continue to be exploited by attackers.
A lot of work has already been done to create the AFCX, but that work has only brought market participants to the starting line. And while each participant has been training for its own 100-metre sprint, the challenge now is to train for those critical moments when responsibility for a coordinated defence transitions from one participant to another.
A successful relay team is not simply four individuals running 100 metres as fast as they can. It is a team effort, where each runner brings specific strengths. But no matter how good any individual runner might be, success depends on their ability to coordinate the handover.
In a sprint race, only one runner can top the podium in the medal ceremony. In a relay, all four runners share that glory.