Fraud has become one of the biggest industries nobody wants to admit exists. Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman wants the US to start treating it that way.
Speaking at an American Banker event in New York on Tuesday, Friedman proposed a National Fraud Strategy. The plan would coordinate the fight against financial crime across banks, tech companies, telecom providers and law enforcement. The timing is pointed: criminals are using AI to run scams at a scale that individual institutions struggle to match.
What Friedman is proposing
Friedman gave the keynote at the American Banker Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance Conference on October 20, 2026. She landed at No. 4 on that publication’s 2026 Most Powerful Women in Finance list.
Her framework rests on a few core pillars. The first is responsible information sharing between the institutions that see fraud happening. The second is a set of common best practices. The third, and probably the most consequential, is legal safe harbors that would protect organizations when they collaborate.
Banks and other firms often hesitate to share data on suspected criminals because of privacy and liability concerns. A safe harbor would give them legal cover to compare notes.
Friedman also pushed for joint Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs. These are the filings financial institutions submit to authorities when they spot transactions that look like money laundering or fraud. Today, institutions generally file them independently. Joint filings would let multiple institutions flag the same scheme together, which matters when a single scam bounces money across several banks.
The strategy would bring financial institutions, technology companies, telecom providers, and law enforcement agencies to the table.
One notable detail: Friedman said the plan does not require new regulators or new mandates. Instead, she argued it should fit within the existing anti-money laundering framework, which is already being modernized.
The numbers behind the urgency
The scale of the problem is staggering. An estimated $4.4 trillion in illicit funds was laundered globally in 2025. Fraud losses alone run to more than $500 billion, with coverage of Friedman’s speech pegging the figure at $579 billion.
Nine out of ten anti-financial crime professionals reported an increase in AI-driven attacks. Friedman acknowledged that AI-enabled scams have made criminal operations more effective and contributed to heavy financial losses in recent years.
A fraud ring might open accounts at one bank, launder money through another, and contact victims through a telecom network and a social platform. Each organization sees a piece. Nobody sees the whole picture. A national strategy is meant to connect those dots.
Why Nasdaq cares about fraud
In 2021, Nasdaq acquired Verafin for $2.75 billion, a provider of AI-powered anti-financial crime tools. That deal has become an important part of Nasdaq’s growth story. Verafin’s technology helps financial institutions detect fraud and money laundering, which places Nasdaq squarely in the market that a national strategy would energize.
Nasdaq also acquired Adenza for $10.5 billion in 2023, further positioning the company as a key player in financial crime compliance technology.
What this means for banks and the compliance industry
For financial institutions, the most immediate implication is potential relief from a long-standing bind. Banks face pressure to stop fraud, yet they also face legal risk when they share customer information. Safe harbors and joint SARs could ease that tension, letting them act on intelligence that today often stays locked inside one organization.
The no-new-mandates framing is also significant. Friedman’s proposal is designed to work through existing anti-money laundering structures rather than layering on fresh requirements.
The inclusion of tech companies and telecom providers is where things could get complicated. These firms have historically resisted bearing responsibility for scams that originate on their platforms or networks. The legal safe harbors Friedman described could be the incentive that brings them along.
Friedman’s calls for a national fraud strategy also follow a similar initiative launched by the American Bankers Association and other stakeholders in October 2025.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.