In the world of financial fraud, time is a critical factor. The chances of recovering stolen funds drop significantly after the first 24 hours. Yet despite this urgency, many scam victims hesitate to report incidents, often due to embarrassment, language barriers, or limited access to reporting channels.
A new partnership between FNA, a specialist in building National Fraud Portals, and Proto, a leader in multilingual AI-driven citizen engagement, aims to address that gap. Together, they’re building an integrated solution that enables financial authorities to respond more quickly and effectively to fraud reports—connecting victims to recourse faster, and with less friction.
Proto’s AI assistants have already proven their ability to make financial systems more accessible. Deployed in collaboration with central banks and regulators, these assistants allow citizens to report fraud and other complaints in local languages through anonymous and user-friendly channels. In the Philippines, a Proto chatbot built with the central bank now manages all consumer complaints in Taglish (a blend of Tagalog and English). In Rwanda, the National Bank’s implementation of Proto’s assistant in Kinyarwanda led to an 80% increase in consumer recourse interactions year-over-year.
On the analytics side, FNA provides advanced fraud portals that help authorities trace fraudulent transactions, detect mule accounts, and take action in real time. For example, their Money Trails solution, deployed by Bank Negara Malaysia within the National Fraud Portal, reduced the average time to trace illicit fund flows to just 30 minutes. A key focus for FNA this year is to build a partner ecosystem that provides specialised modules for the various stakeholders benefiting from the portal.
By combining these capabilities, the partnership offers regulators a more complete and responsive workflow: from the moment a victim files a complaint, often in their native language with an AI assistant, through to the technical tracing of the funds themselves.
Proto CEO Curtis Matlock said: "Time is of the essence in scam recovery. By integrating our AI assistants with FNA’s analytics platform, we’re streamlining the connection between victims, supervisors, and financial institutions — regardless of language, literacy, or background.”
FNA CEO Kimmo Soramäki added: “The combination of real-time analytics and AI-powered consumer engagement equips financial authorities with a practical, end-to-end solution for addressing fraud. It’s an important step toward building greater resilience and trust in the financial system.”
The partnership comes at a pressing time when financial scams are at unseen levels, costing the global economy $1 trillion in 2023 per the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. This fraud unfortunately and disproportionately targets the newest financial consumers in developing countries. For example, the World Banks’s 2023 study on Digital Finance Consumer Risks found that 90% of consumers in Senegal experienced a consumer protection challenge, and 40% lost money as a result. When consumers are not protected, it damages their trust in financial systems and prevents them from accessing life-changing tools proven to lift citizens out of poverty, like microloans and digital payments.
Once this trust is lost, it is very difficult to regain. Arming countries with end-to-end tools like the FNA and Proto integration is not only a positive application of AI, but a practical approach to rapidly detecting scams, shutting down threat actors, and recovering citizens’ hard-earned money.
