Image generated by Deeptech Times using Google Gemini
The battle lines in financial crime have shifted. What was once a game of perimeter defence and rule-based fraud controls has become an asymmetric war of intelligence, speed and AI-powered deception.
The message from Matt DeLauro, president of GTM at SEON, in a conversation with Deeptech Times on the sidelines of the Singapore FinTech Festival 2025, is unequivocal.
We’ve entered an era where fraud is industrialised, hyper-personalised and alarmingly accessible; and unless institutions collaborate boldly, adversaries will continue to win.
“Synthetic identity has been effectively democratised with the rise of AI,” DeLauro warned. Not long ago, creating tens of thousands of fake identities required specialised skills such as data breach expertise, algorithmic sophistication and document engineering. “Today, fraudsters specialise. One person focuses on acquiring stolen IDs, another on generating one-time phone numbers, another on document manipulation. They no longer need to be multi-disciplinary. They are networked.”
The consequence: synthetic identities at industrial scale, legitimate looking enough to fool traditional KYC frameworks and slip into financial systems undetected.
While banks and regulators have long recognised the vulnerability of elderly customers, AI has destroyed the old demographic assumptions. Generative voice cloning, deepfake video and hyper-personalised spear-phishing attacks have taken deception to a level that makes even trained professionals uncertain.
“Pretty much everybody is at stake now,” DeLauro said. “We’ve seen cases of corporate executives being impersonated on video, authorising transactions. Voice cloning makes it almost impossible for the layperson to know what’s real. AI and GenAI have blurred the line between legitimate and fraudulent behaviour.”
Why traditional KYC is no longer enough
The industry’s historic reliance on document-based verification is quickly being outpaced. “KYC isn’t what it used to be. It’s no longer the cyber defence financial institutions need,” DeLauro argued.
SEON’s response is an architectural shift towards frictionless, behavioural-driven and real-time risk intelligence. Instead of relying on static checkpoints, identity is continuously validated through digital footprinting, device telemetry, behavioural biometrics and session intelligence.
The future of security, according to DeLauro, is dynamic friction.
“As soon as somebody lands on your website, you need tools determining whether they’re a malicious actor. You don’t wait for full documentation.”
Even something as simple as email analysis can become a powerful indicator of intent before the customer enters a KYC workflow.
Collaboration is a competitive advantage
Losses in financial crime are rising fastest not because criminals are smarter, but because institutions too often fight alone. DeLauro pushes for a mindset shift he sees emerging among modern fintechs: strategic, deep collaboration instead of transactional vendor relationships.
Historically, banks viewed service providers with suspicion: a procurement dance of lowest cost, minimal access and rigid territoriality. That model is obsolete.
“Pick strategic providers you invest in significantly over time. Invite them in. Co-create solutions.”
The same applies to information sharing. Full data exchange may be constrained by regulation, but metadata exchange (machine-generated patterns and insights summarised through LLMs) is an untapped catalyst for progress.
LLMs can process in hours what human analysts might take months to uncover, exposing fraud rings earlier and enabling industry-wide defensive learning.
Regulation must accelerate and Asia has a historic opportunity
For all the promise of collaboration, regulatory friction remains a bottleneck. Data residency rules require increasing infrastructure footprints; data reciprocity between countries has eroded; and cross-border alignment is fragmented.
DeLauro sees an urgent need for a regional framework akin to Europe’s GDPR.
“If ASEAN develops a common standard for AI and data privacy, a network-level standard, it would be transformational for fighting financial crime across borders,” he said.
Singapore, he believes, is uniquely positioned to lead.
“Singapore is almost designed for this. It’s the most international financial hub and the natural leader to drive regional consensus.”
The next five years could determine whether Southeast Asia becomes the world’s model for AI-era financial security, or a patchwork vulnerable at its seams.
Inside SEON’s APAC strategy
SEON is backing its convictions with aggressive investment. Following its Series C funding and rapid expansion, APAC is now one of the company’s highest-priority regions. Singapore is the company’s regional centre of excellence that anchors sales, technical consulting, site reliability, partnerships and customer success.
“Our plan is to double our team and three times our regional customer base within 12 to 18 months,” said DeLauro.
In Southeast Asia’s fragmented markets, SEON is taking a partner-first strategy, building alliances with cybersecurity integrators, resellers and industry specialists in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.
SEON’s growing footprint in Southeast Asia is reinforced by a strong roster of regional customers, including VP Bank, Home Credit, Salmon Group, Chocolate Finance, Billease, and Fingular. Together, they span a diverse spectrum of banking, lending, digital payments and modern financial services; demonstrating SEON’s ability to deliver scalable, real-time protection for organisations powering Southeast Asia’s rapidly expanding digital economy.
AI inside: How SEON is transforming from within
Besides leveraging AI to fight fraud, SEON is also using AI intensively inside its own operations. The biggest gains are occurring in R&D, CI/CD automation, testing, documentation and developer augmentation.
“AI has made our best knowledge workers five to 10 times more efficient,” DeLauro said. But crucially, AI is not replacing expertise, it is amplifying it.
“Your best people are using more tokens, using more applications and increasing their output significantly. AI will coexist with knowledge workers: that’s where the value truly is.”
Full AI autonomy in compliance and decisioning is still limited by regulation, but DeLauro expects that to evolve. Over time, he predicts, standards will emerge enabling AI-only decisioning in areas such as credit, sanctions and high-volume transaction diligence.
A defining race and a call to leadership
The industry stands at a historic inflection point. Fraudsters have embraced AI without constraint or regulation. Financial institutions cannot win through isolated defence.
The winners of the next decade will be institutions that embrace continuous identity and dynamic risk scoring, share intelligence boldly and responsibly, treat partners as co-innovators, not vendors, adopt human-in-the-loop automation, and push for regional regulatory unity instead of fragmentation.
“We’re limited only by how fast regulators catch up. But I do foresee a world where full autonomy becomes permissible and the organisations preparing for it now will define the future,” DeLauro concluded.
The AI-enabled fraud crisis is not just a security problem. It is a test of the financial ecosystem’s ability to collaborate at scale. If Southeast Asia aligns, builds standards and shares intelligence, it can become the global leader in autonomous, AI-resilient finance.
If not, criminals will continue to innovate faster than the systems built to stop them.
