NiCE Actimize launches network for real-time risk checks

NiCE Actimize has launched the Actimize Insights Network for financial institutions, aimed at giving banks real-time visibility into counterparty risk.

The service is designed to help institutions identify risky recipients before a payment is completed, including when a transaction appears legitimate under conventional monitoring tools. The system draws on data from NiCE Actimize's broader fraud and financial crime network to flag patterns that may not be visible within a single bank's systems.

The launch comes as banks face rising losses from authorised push payment scams, business email compromise and other forms of social engineering fraud. In these cases, customers often appear to be acting normally because they have been persuaded to send money themselves, making it harder for traditional transaction monitoring systems to intervene.

Counterparty risk has become a central issue in scam detection because many controls focus on the account holder initiating a payment rather than the recipient. By widening the view to include information on payees, institutions can assess whether a destination account has links to suspicious activity elsewhere in the network.

Network approach

The new system generates risk signals from activity seen across payment types, channels and customer journeys. Those signals can be used in both fraud prevention and anti-money laundering investigations, giving compliance and fraud teams a shared source of intelligence.

The network was built for instant payments, where decisions often need to be made in milliseconds. That matters for banks under pressure to stop scams without delaying genuine transfers or increasing checks for legitimate customers.

One of the persistent tensions in payment fraud prevention is the trade-off between intervention and customer experience. If controls are too blunt, banks may delay or block ordinary payments; if they are too permissive, scam losses can rise. The network is intended to support more targeted intervention by identifying transactions where the underlying risk is tied to the recipient rather than the sender's behaviour.

Craig Costigan, Chief Executive Officer at NiCE Actimize, described the product as part of a broader collaborative response to financial crime.

"Financial crime is borderless, fast-moving, and increasingly sophisticated. No single institution can fight it alone," said Craig Costigan, Chief Executive Officer at NiCE Actimize.

"The Actimize Insights Network transforms isolated efforts into a unified force for smarter, faster, and more effective financial crime prevention that strengthens the entire ecosystem," Costigan said.

Industry pressure

Banks in several markets are under growing regulatory and commercial pressure to improve their response to payment scams. That pressure has increased as instant payments become more common and fraudsters adapt quickly to consumer behaviour, new communication channels and weaknesses in bank-to-bank information sharing.

In many scam cases, the payment instruction itself does not look unusual when judged only against a customer's past activity. A customer may use a familiar device, pass authentication checks and follow a normal payment journey, yet still send money to a mule account or a fraudulent recipient. That has pushed more providers to seek intelligence beyond the boundaries of a single institution.

The network also has a role in anti-money laundering work by helping investigators identify patterns and relationships that might otherwise remain hidden. Cross-network signals can help teams connect activity across institutions and channels, which is often difficult when data remains fragmented.

Trace Fooshee, Strategic Advisor at Datos Insights, said scale and client reach would be important in making a network model useful to banks.

"Collaboration isn't just a best practice anymore, it is becoming a competitive advantage. Banks cannot fight sophisticated fraud in isolation. NICE Actimize has the client breadth and maturity needed to make network intelligence work at the level required to actually move the needle," Fooshee said.

NiCE Actimize says it serves more than 1,000 organisations in more than 70 countries, while parent company NiCE says its products are used by organisations in more than 150 countries. That installed base could be significant for a network-based fraud model, where broader participation can improve visibility of suspicious counterparties and payment flows.

The company positioned the new service around a simple problem facing banks: many scam payments do not look suspicious until institutions can assess the destination account as well as the customer sending the money.