To start us off, can you tell us a bit about yourself, as well as your role at Stop Scams UK and what your work focuses on day-to-day?
I’m the Membership & Account Director at Stop Scams UK. I joined Stop Scams in November 2024, having previously led multi-discipline, global collaboration campaigns in online advertising. My focus is on delivering value for our members and helping them to engage and participate in our cross-sector collaborations be it data-sharing to deliver scam intelligence across the sectors, working with other organisations to identify opportunities to shape policy, or collaborating on comms to reach mutual customers with crucial advice to protect themselves from scams.
I love seeing our members from large traditional banks and telcos, to fast growing fintechs and global tech platforms working together to identify ways to disrupt scammers. There are so many opportunities to collaborate and it’s great to see our members come together to deliver innovative, high impact intelligence sharing work.
What are the main blind spots in tracking scams that cross between telcos, online platforms, and banks?
Scams cross the finance, tech and telco sectors; but no one sector has end-to-end visibility over a typical scam journey. The Financial Services firms and their customers feel the financial pain; but they cannot stop the problem without working with telcos and online tech firms. When an individual organisation, no matter how big they are, looks only at the fraud signals they can detect on their own platform, it may not be obvious what is happening. However, if we can layer up the signals across 3 x sectors our members can quickly build a more accurate picture, build legal certainty that there is a fraud attempt and start to trigger appropriate action.
What are the key barriers to achieving real-time intelligence sharing between firms, and how are organisations starting to overcome them?
Privacy, data protection and consumer protection are some of the key obstacles to navigate in working toward real-time intelligence sharing between firms, and it’s absolutely right that this be the case. Industry has an obligation to protect the data and privacy of their customers, but also to help protect them from scams and prevent crime. We have worked very closely with our members over the last 5 years to build the case for data sharing, through robust Data Sharing Agreements and Data Protection Impact Assessments, but also by identifying incredibly strong use cases and pilots. Being able to quickly prove the impact of a data sharing initiative and demonstrate impact and ROI to a business is the most effective way to build momentum for further collaboration and change.
We have also found that having a neutral 3rd party to own and drive the collaboration, with a sole focus on making this happen, has been really useful. We focus on delivering the initiatives that our members have tasked us with, and we do the heavy legwork to make it happen, ensuring we stay focused on our goals and objectives.
Once intelligence is gathered, how do you ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right teams or institutions quickly enough to make an impact?
Across our membership we have access to a vast amount of potential data and signals, however ensuring that what we deliver to each member is actionable intelligence is crucial. We do this by working very closely with our members, facilitating cross-sector discussion and testing our pilots and initiatives very carefully. Sometimes enrichment of data is required before it can become useful and actionable to another sector/organisation, and sometimes a signal can be shared directly. In either case speed and legal certainty are vital, and we have built a platform that allows data to be shared via API.
What is equally as important as sharing intelligence, is sharing back the results and impact of that intelligence. Our members are committing significant resources to cross-sector data sharing and it’s important to be able to demonstrate the impact of this to their own organisations. It creates an ever expanding view of fraud networks and their movements across different sectors and that helps everyone to continuously improve their detection and takedown models. Ultimately we want to get ahead of the fraudsters so sharing intelligence and receiving feedback, and then optimising based on this, is all really important.
Looking ahead, what does ‘good’ look like when it comes to upstream scam prevention — and how close are we as an industry to achieving that vision?
Looking ahead we believe it’s important to measure the impact of scam prevention in terms of its ‘ecosystem’ impact. How much of the UK population are we able to protect, and how can we continue to drive these figures forward be that through covering X% of the UK banking sector, X million UK online users or telephone customers.
So a future where all UK consumers are protected because the companies that provide their bank, phone and online platforms etc. are all actively working with each other and sharing intelligence in real time is what we are striving towards. We are well on our way to achieving that vision with Stop Scams UK now including 100% of the UK’s Mobile Network Operators and 99.7% of the UK’s retail banking providers as members, alongside some of the largest technical platforms in the world. Acceleration of the work that is already happening, and engagement from the businesses that are still fighting this alone, is what is needed next.