Global Signal Exchange hailed as fraud sharing model

A study by the Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing research programme has identified Global Signal Exchange as a model for cross-sector fraud intelligence sharing. It found broad support among anti-fraud leaders for cross-border data sharing.

The research, released by Nick Maxwell of the Royal United Services Institute, examined 37 collaborative analytics platforms against a backdrop of fraud losses estimated at USD $579.4 billion in 2025. It found that 91% of anti-fraud leaders consider cross-border data sharing essential, yet most platforms remain focused on domestic markets.

According to the study, that gap has left threat intelligence fragmented across jurisdictions and sectors. It cited Global Signal Exchange, or GSE, as a technical example of how multi-party networks can connect participants across those divides.

GSE is operated by Oxford Information Labs, a UK-based non-profit, and launched in 2025 with Google as a co-founder. The platform aggregates threat signals related to scams, fraud and other cybercrime and has now reached 1.2 billion signals.

The findings point to a wider problem for financial institutions, technology groups and public bodies as they respond to increasingly international scam networks. Although organisations often agree in principle on sharing intelligence, practical barriers including regulation, localisation rules and system design still limit what can be exchanged and where.

Research findings

Separate analysis by Oxford Information Labs shows the patterns that emerge when signals are pooled at scale. Reviewing nearly 30 million domain-based signals, the group found that broad, general-population content represented 34% of total weighted relevance across all scam material.

That picture changed when the analysis focused on the most explicitly harmful signals. In that subset, gambling content accounted for 48.1%, suggesting a more concentrated pattern of abuse in material judged most severe.

The researchers also found tactical overlap between methods used to target adults with gambling addictions and those used against adolescents in the same digital spaces. This suggests that fraud and scam operators may be reusing the same methods across different vulnerable groups.

Early consumer research from Oxford Information Labs added another layer. Preliminary findings indicated that people with cognitive or memory disabilities were more than twice as likely to lose money to scams as the national average, while 71% of people who had experienced a scam did not try to report it.

Those figures reinforce an argument increasingly heard across the anti-fraud sector: consumer protection cannot rely mainly on individual reporting or personal vigilance when much of the problem sits within online infrastructure and financial networks.

Platform update

Alongside the publication of the study, GSE released version 2.7.0 of its platform. The update includes a Feedback API designed for large-scale ingestion, feedback metrics dashboards, and changes to Compass, the platform's interface for league tables and index data.

Its GSE Index algorithm was also updated to reflect more accurately the balance of factors used in calculations. Lucien Taylor, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of GSE, has previously presented the platform's use of league tables to map weak points in scam supply chains using its threat signal base.

Google executives also highlighted the platform's role in cross-sector information sharing. Karen Courington, Vice President of Trust and Safety at Google, described GSE as "one of the most effective solutions for cross-sector collaboration" and stressed the need to "tackle scams more collectively."

Amanda Storey, Managing Director of Trust and Safety at Google, offered a separate assessment: "Fighting scams requires a united front, and this platform provides exactly that. By sharing threat data cross-sector, we can identify and disrupt scams before they can cause harm."

For Oxford Information Labs, the study matters less as an endorsement than as evidence that the policy debate has moved beyond whether intelligence should be shared to how it can be done in practice. That includes managing the legal complexities of moving data between organisations in different countries while maintaining operational usefulness.

Emily Taylor, Chief Executive Officer of OXIL, linked the latest findings to those implementation issues. "The FFIS study confirms what we see every day: the will to share intelligence across borders is there, but the infrastructure to do it hasn't kept pace," she said. "Data sharing is easy to commit to in principle, but the legal and technical barriers are real. Jurisdictional complexity and data localisation requirements mean that good intentions don't automatically translate into shared intelligence, and that's precisely the gap the GSE is built to close. The emerging findings on vulnerable communities are a further reminder that the scam threat falls unevenly, which is exactly why the response needs to be collective rather than leaving it to individuals to protect themselves."

Lucien Taylor, Co-Founder of OXIL, tied the platform's technical work to partners' operational use. "Reaching 1.2 billion threat signals is meaningful, but only if partners can act on them," he said. "Every improvement we make to Compass and the feedback tooling is about reducing the distance between data and action."