The International Monetary Fund has urged banks to share more threat and transaction data with one another, arguing in a recent working paper that the sector’s response to fast-rising digital fraud is weakened by information silos within institutions and across borders, American Banker reported.
The intergovernmental organization said inadequate frameworks for cybersecurity incident reporting, along with weak domestic and cross-border information-sharing arrangements, are limiting the financial sector’s ability to understand and combat rising cyber threats. U.S. banks have been hit especially hard, with the IMF identifying 6,479 publicly known cybersecurity incidents across all industries in the United States from 2014 through 2023, or 46 percent of the global total of 14,055.
U.S. regulators have long encouraged banks to share suspicious transaction data and the issue remains a focus for policymakers, American Banker said. Last week, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed rules that would require banks to adopt a more risk-based anti-money-laundering approach, with the goal of generating information on illicit transactions that is more useful to law enforcement and national security agencies.
Although FinCEN’s proposal does not mandate information sharing, it repeatedly references Section 314(b) of the PATRIOT Act, which allows banks to share payment transaction information when they identify possible money laundering, the newspaper said.
FinCEN has separately encouraged more collaboration among financial institutions. In September 2025 guidance, the bureau argued that robust sharing of transaction records, customer and account data, and investigative materials can strengthen banks’ collective ability to detect, prevent, and mitigate illicit finance, the news outlet said.
The IMF also found that legal and regulatory barriers continue to complicate cross-border data sharing. U.S. banks considering whether to share information with foreign institutions must navigate federal privacy protections, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, state-level privacy laws, and foreign legal requirements, the working paper said.
Read more at American Banker