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Three of Spain’s largest banking groups have taken a significant step towards strengthening the fight against financial crime, launching a shared fraud intelligence platform designed to identify and prevent fraudulent activity before losses occur.
FrauDfense, a joint venture owned by CaixaBank, Banco Santander and BBVA, has officially launched its first operational service, FrauDfense Check, following a year-long pilot programme that demonstrated the potential of collaborative fraud detection across the banking sector.
The initiative reflects a growing recognition that financial institutions can no longer tackle increasingly sophisticated fraud threats in isolation. Instead, the focus is shifting towards real-time intelligence sharing and coordinated industry action.
A New Approach to Fraud Prevention
At the heart of the platform is a secure information-sharing framework that enables participating financial institutions to exchange fraud-related intelligence, identify common criminal patterns and coordinate responses to emerging threats.
During the pilot phase, the three banks applied the platform across a broad range of banking activities, including customer onboarding, account opening, credit transfers, instant payments, Bizum transactions and card payments.
According to the participating institutions, the service helped prevent fraud losses worth millions of euros, highlighting the benefits of collective intelligence in identifying suspicious activity that may not be visible to a single institution acting alone.
Preparing for a New Regulatory Environment
The launch also comes as European regulators place increasing emphasis on fraud information sharing. The forthcoming European Payment Services Regulation (PSR) is expected to introduce stronger regulatory requirements for payment service providers to exchange fraud-related data in order to improve customer protection and reduce financial crime. This collaborative model provides key support for that.
By establishing a structured and privacy-preserving framework for collaboration, FrauDfense positions participating institutions to meet these evolving regulatory expectations while improving operational effectiveness.
The company has now opened participation to the wider Spanish financial sector, with the aim of creating a broader industry network capable of delivering stronger collective defences against fraud.
Collaboration Becomes a Competitive Necessity
The launch of FrauDfense Check highlights a wider shift occurring across the payments industry. As fraudsters increasingly exploit instant payments, digital channels and sophisticated social engineering techniques, traditional institution-by-institution approaches are proving less effective.
Shared intelligence, collaborative analytics and sector-wide coordination are emerging as critical tools in the fight against financial crime.
For Spain’s banking sector, the initiative represents a move towards a more proactive model of fraud prevention—one that seeks not merely to detect fraud after the event, but to stop it before customers and institutions suffer losses. If successful, it could provide a blueprint for similar collaborative fraud prevention programmes across Europe.
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