Financial crime and fraud
Financial crime and fraud harm customers, weaken trust and drain resources from the institutions and public services that people depend on. Crises make them worse: disasters bring relief fraud, outages bring impersonation, and new payment channels bring new scams. The Global Risks Alliance (GRA) examines financial integrity and customer risks as shared industry questions of method and evidence. It investigates no case, shares no customer information and provides no compliance service. See Financial-system risk.
- Institution
- The Global Risks Alliance (GRA)
- Service level
- R0: information and enquiries
Risk register
Financial crime and fraud · Member portfolio · Quarter 3
Register
| Concentration in coastal property | Insurance | High | Above | Chief risk officer |
| Liquidity under redemption stress | Liquidity | Medium | Within | Treasury |
| Model error, cat pricing | Model | Medium | Above | Independent validation |
| Third-party cloud outage | Operational | Medium | Within | Operations |
Heat map
GRA · Risk registerRisk register, in outline: domain structure with placeholder names and illustrative values, not a record.
The short answer.
Financial crime and fraud risk is the harm that money laundering, fraud and scams do to customers, trust and the institutions people depend on, made worse in crises by relief fraud, impersonation and new payment channels. GRA examines it as a shared question of method and evidence and investigates no case or customer.
Financial centres and urban exposure in Nigeria.
The cities where people, assets and financial activity concentrate, shown for Nigeria as an example geography for this subject.
How crime and fraud become systemic.
| Channel | How the shock reaches finance |
|---|---|
| Customer harm | Scams and account takeover cause direct losses and lasting distrust, often falling on vulnerable customers |
| Crisis exploitation | Disasters and outages create openings for relief fraud, impersonation and false appeals |
| Integrity of flows | Illicit finance moves through correspondent, trade and digital channels across borders |
| Operational cost | Losses, remediation and controls absorb resources across the industry |
| Exclusion | De-risking cuts off legitimate customers and regions from financial services |
Channels describe mechanisms, not measured strengths or probabilities.
The rules that define the controls.
| Instrument | Status | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| FATF Recommendations | Global standard, assessed in mutual evaluations | Risk-based approach, customer due diligence, beneficial ownership and suspicious transaction reporting |
| Revised Recommendation 16 on payment transparency | Adopted June 2025; implementation expected by the end of 2030; assessment methodology annex published | More complete originator and beneficiary data on cross-border and some domestic payments, and fraud prevention aims |
| Sanctions regimes | National and UN regimes, each with its own authority | Screening obligations that differ by jurisdiction; GRA describes none as advice |
Where disaster and crime risk meet.
Fraud and laundering patterns change after shocks. Emergency cash transfers, reconstruction contracts and insurance claims surges create predictable openings, and they occur where the disaster occurred. GRA studies these patterns at sector level: the timing and location of payment flows after an event, against the controls that apply, without handling any case or customer data.
The work connects to Financial Crime and Fraud, and to the governance of information integrity at GRF Information Integrity where scams exploit crisis communication.
Shared questions GRA works on.
- 01
Fraud after shocks
How do fraud patterns change after disasters and outages, and what would show it early?
- 02
New channels
Which features of new payment and digital channels create shared vulnerabilities?
- 03
Exclusion effects
When does de-risking push legitimate customers out of the system, and with what economic consequences?
- 04
Method evidence
Which detection methods hold up across institutions, and where do models fail?
Methods and evidence, never cases or customers.
- GRA does not investigate cases, file reports or act for any authority.
- It does not receive, hold or exchange information about identifiable customers or transactions.
- It provides no compliance, screening or monitoring service and certifies no programme.
- Integrity concerns about GRA itself go to integrity@globalriskalliance.com; related evidence on exclusion is on Economic and social consequences.
The same subject across the Consortium.
Financial Crime and Fraud Risk
The specialist community, in development: Financial Crime and Fraud Risk.
Digital public infrastructure
Evidence from The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI): Digital Public Infrastructure.
Information integrity
Dialogue convened by The Global Risks Forum (GRF): Information Integrity and Public Trust.
Terms used on this page.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Money laundering | Processing criminal proceeds to disguise their illegal origin so they can be used as if legitimate. |
| Authorised push payment fraud | Fraud in which a victim is tricked into authorising a payment to a criminal's account. |
| Risk-based due diligence | Due diligence whose depth is proportionate to the severity and likelihood of adverse impacts. |
| Financial Action Task Force | The intergovernmental body that sets the international standards against money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing, and assesses countries through mutual evaluations. |
Where this page's references lead.
The bodies and documents this page is read against. Status and editions change; each link goes to the issuing body.
Questions and answers.
Can I report a fraud to GRA?
Do institutions share suspicious-activity information through GRA?
Why is de-risking part of this page?
Around GRA.
Start with an enquiry.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.