Fraud is becoming more organised, more collaborative, and faster-moving than the defences built to stop it. Criminal networks now share intelligence and move funds across borders in seconds, and banks are under growing pressure to rethink fraud prevention from the ground up.
Belgium's new anti-phishing action plan is the latest sign of where the industry is heading. Drawn up by Febelfin, the Belgian banking federation, at the request of Minister for Consumer Protection Rob Beenders, the plan responds to a sharp rise in fraud losses: phishing reports in Belgium rose 30% year-on-year in 2025, with fraudsters making off with around €93 million. The response is built on three pillars, and each one points to a wider shift now playing out across European fraud prevention.
For financial institutions across Europe, the message is clear: fraud prevention is becoming an ecosystem responsibility, not an institutional one.
Pillar One: Strengthening Fraud Prevention Within Banks
The first pillar puts the focus back on the individual institution: lower standard transfer limits, a mandatory cooling-off period before limit increases take effect, and a commitment to resolve fraud complaints within 15 banking days. It's a deliberate move towards "slow banking" - giving customers a moment to think before an instant payment becomes irreversible.
The underlying challenge is one every bank in Europe recognises. Fraud controls built for overnight batch processing don't hold up in a world where payments settle in seconds. Institutions are responding by investing in:
- Real-time payment monitoring
- Behavioural analytics and risk scoring
- Stronger customer due diligence
- AI-assisted fraud detection
- Integrated case management for faster investigations
The goal isn't just to flag more activity - it's to identify genuine fraud more precisely, without adding friction for legitimate customers. This is exactly the balance Eastnets solves for: our AI-powered fraud and compliance tools cut false positives by up to 90%*, freeing investigation teams to focus on the cases that matter. When Mastercard migrated to SafeWatch Screening 5.0, it strengthened detection accuracy and processing efficiency without disrupting operational continuity. American Express KSA saw a similar outcome, reducing false positives after moving to the same platform.
Integrated case management is doing more of the heavy lifting here, too. Eastnets' FinCrme Intelligence Platform brings screening, monitoring and investigation data into a single view, so analysts aren't chasing the same case across five systems - a capability increasingly seen as essential rather than optional as instant payments scale.
Pillar Two: From Isolated Detection to Shared Intelligence
The second pillar is where Belgium's plan gets genuinely interesting: a joint platform for banks to exchange fraud data, so suspicious patterns surface across the sector rather than staying locked inside one institution.
Financial criminals rarely respect institutional boundaries. Criminal networks routinely target several banks at once, which means the intelligence that would stop them is often scattered across the wider ecosystem rather than sitting inside any single organisation's fraud engine.
Belgium isn't the first to try this. Spain's Iberpay has run its Payguard fraud-sharing service since 2020, pooling data from connected banks to spot mule accounts and suspicious transfers across the entire system. France and Belgium's own clearing house, STET, applies AI-driven fraud scoring across all payment types it processes. And at the pan-European level, the European Payments Council is developing FRIDA (Fraud Information Distribution Arrangement) - a scheme designed to let payment service providers share fraud intelligence under common rules across the whole SEPA area, in anticipation of the incoming Payment Services Regulation.
The direction of travel is unmistakable: coordinated intelligence catches fraud that no single institution could see on its own, and stops it from spreading to the next bank in line.
Pillar Three: Extending Collaboration Beyond Banking
The third pillar looks past banking altogether. Belgium's plan explicitly brings in telecoms operators, technology companies and government departments - recognising that financial crime rarely stays inside the financial system.
That's consistent with what's already happening at pan-European level. Swift's AI-enhanced fraud detection service draws on pseudonymised data across its global network to flag suspicious transactions in real time, while EBA CLEARING has built Fraud Pattern and Anomaly Detection (FPAD) alongside Verification of Payee to strengthen defences across its user community. As these cross-sector partnerships mature, banks stand to gain earlier warning of fraud patterns forming outside their own four walls - not just after the payment has already gone out the door.
A European Direction of Travel
Implementation timelines will differ from country to country, but the direction is consistent. Regulators across Europe are moving past compliance frameworks built around individual institutions, towards a more connected model combining:
- Real-time fraud detection
- Cross-institution intelligence sharing
- Collaboration with payment infrastructures
- Integrated investigations and case management
- Closer public and private sector cooperation
These threads run alongside the wider regulatory push around instant payments, Verification of Payee and the incoming Payment Services Regulation (PSR) - all aimed at building trust in digital payments while shutting down the space fraud operates in.
National initiatives in Belgium, Spain, France and other EU markets should therefore be seen not as isolated local responses, but as early moves towards the operating model FRIDA is expected to formalise: harmonised fraud prevention practices, common intelligence-sharing rules and stronger protection for European citizens at pan-European scale.
Preparing for the Next Generation of Fraud Prevention
Technology alone won't solve this. The institutions that get ahead will be the ones that combine intelligent monitoring, collaborative intelligence sharing and streamlined investigations into a single operating model - rather than treating them as three separate projects.
That's the model Eastnets builds towards every day. Trusted by 800+ financial institutions across more than 120 jurisdictions, including 15 of the world's top 50 banks, our solutions - spanning SafeWatch AML, SafeWatch Screening, PaymentSafe FinCrime Intelligence Platform - are designed to close the exact gaps this new wave of regulation is targeting: faster detection, fewer false positives, and one unified view of every case.
Belgium's plan is national in scope, but its message travels well beyond its borders. Alongside similar initiatives in Spain, France and other EU markets, it points towards the fraud prevention model FRIDA is expected to enable: one where shared intelligence, harmonised practices and coordinated action strengthen protection for citizens across Europe. The future of fraud prevention isn't about any one institution defending its own walls - it's about scaling resilience across the entire European financial ecosystem.
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References
VRT NWS – Plan to combat phishing: lower transfer limits, a waiting period before limits are increased and faster complaint processing (8 July 2026)
Febelfin – Fraud & security
Iberpay – Fraud Prevention (Payguard)
STET – Homepage / fraud prevention solutions
European Payments Council – EPC launches RFI for FRIDA central platform
Business Wire – Swift to Launch AI-Powered Fraud Defence to Enhance Cross-Border Payments
The Paypers – EBA CLEARING introduces Pan-European payment security system
Eastnets – Precision at Scale: How Mastercard Strengthened AML Compliance with Eastnets
Eastnets – How American Express KSA streamlined compliance and reduced false positives with SafeWatch Screening 5