Fighting fraud in the digital age: Top insights from Money20/20

LSEG Risk Intelligence attended Money20/20 Europe in June 2025, hosting the award-winning C-suite podcast team at our booth. The team interviewed a wide range of event attendees and unpacked some crucial topics in the financial crime space.

• AI is fuelling identity fraud, including synthetic identities and deepfakes, creating serious challenges for businesses and regulators.
• Child identity theft is rising, with alarming statistics and underreported cases that demand increased awareness and protection.
• Payment fraud demands collaboration, as faster, cross-border payments require better interoperability, regulation, and data sharing.

Money 20/20 Europe was held in Amsterdam in early June 2025 and brought together approximately 7500 fintech industry leaders to collaborate and share ideas around technology, trends, challenges and solutions.

LSEG Risk Intelligence was proud to host the C-suite podcast at our booth. This award-winning series features insights and debate around the topics most relevant to senior professionals today. 

The podcast hosts interviewed a number of event attendees and unpacked a range of topics around fraud and financial crime. 

David White, Global Head of Product & Data, LSEG Risk Intelligence kicks off the first podcast, “Fighting fraud with AI: Synthetic IDs, deepfakes and child identity theft”, sharing his insights around the latest trends in AI-enabled identity theft and fraud.

White outlines the most prevalent fraud trends today, including:

• Synthetic identity fraud, which is growing rapidly and can be difficult to combat
• Deepfakes, which are now becoming the toolkit of choice for the perpetrators of financial crime
• Child identity theft, a “very worrying” trend that is often under-reported because family members may be involved
• Real-time payment fraud, which is increasingly attractive to financial criminals in the digital payments space

White explains further that most identity fraud is enabled by readily available and highly sophisticated technology. Advances in AI mean that the cost of committing fraud is going down, a factor that he says is “leading to the industrialisation of identity theft”.

Unsurprisingly, the number of victims is rising exponentially – and it is important to remain cognisant of the very real human cost of these crimes.

Added to this, these crimes are also creating a substantial overhead for companies, which are tasked with constantly fighting fraud by investing in the latest tools and tech.

Moving on to synthetic identity fraud, White stresses that this is a particularly challenging crime, because the basis of the fraud is real information: “Criminals typically use some information that relates to a real person or company but then build up a fake persona around this information. More and more, synthetic identities feel very real and are created by sophisticated criminals using sophisticated tech.”

Finally, on the sensitive topic of child identity fraud, White cautions that the statistics around this crime are alarming, with 1 in 50 children in the US expected to have their identity stolen. 

LSEG Risk Intelligence will shortly be launching both a white paper and a documentary on this topic with the dual aims of bringing much-needed visibility to these crimes and expanding the protection available.

In a separate podcast entitled “Fighting payment fraud with AI, regulation and innovation”, 

Dal Sahota, Global Director, Trusted Payments, LSEG Risk Intelligence drills down into the complexities of payment fraud, beginning with a discussion around the concept of interoperability.

Sahota explains that interoperability essentially refers to the ability of different elements of payment systems to work together, pointing out how important this is given that there are now many more ways to pay than there ever have been before. 

The discussion turns to APP (Authorised Push Payment) fraud, which is becoming ever-more widespread. APP scams generally involve a fraudster convincing a victim to authorise a payment under false pretences. In the UK, APP fraud represents as much as 40% of payment fraud .

When asked about expected key industry developments, Sahota says that regulation will take centre stage in the immediate future, citing various regulatory initiatives across the globe. These are largely being driven by rising rates of fraud against a backdrop of faster payments and more cross-border payments.

He stresses that existing legislation needs to adapt to consider the myriad changes that have occurred in our day-to-day transactions in the digital age.

Perhaps most importantly, Sahota says this regulatory reform needs to be supported by sustained collaboration, with all market participants working together to solve the global fraud challenge.