Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and DSGV Form Anti-Fraud Joint Venture

Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and DSGV, the German Savings Banks Finance Group that represents the Sparkassen, said on November 11, 2026 they will form a joint venture to run a shared bank fraud information sharing platform for phishing, investment fraud, merchandise fraud and love scams.

The three founding shareholders have not disclosed the venture’s name, the ownership split, a launch date or a list of further members. They said the first application is already at an advanced stage of development. The scale of the founders matters: Germany’s two largest private-sector banks and the savings banks network that serves much of the retail market are agreeing to pool fraud findings that were previously held in separate systems.

How the bank fraud information sharing platform will work

The new company is meant to give financial institutions a common way to exchange information on suspected fraud across institutional boundaries. If one bank identifies an account being used fraudulently, it could make that finding available to other participants, which can then check their own customers and flows.

The founders said the venture will use multi-party computation (MPC) and other cryptographic methods. These let participants compare selected information without revealing all of their underlying data to each other.

Each institution keeps responsibility for assessing what it receives and for deciding on protective measures. The platform supplies information; it does not make decisions for the banks.

The founders listed data protection, purpose limitation, data minimization and controlled disclosure as central design principles. They described the exchange as compliant with data protection rules.

Why fraud information sharing matters to compliance teams

Fraudsters often use accounts at several banks and move money quickly between them, the founders said, so each bank usually sees only part of the activity. A phishing campaign that reaches customers of one lender is typically hitting others at the same time.

Spalt put the problem in terms of scale.

“Financial crime is becoming increasingly professional and does not stop at company boundaries.” Bernd Spalt, Chief Risk Officer, Commerzbank

For fraud and financial-crime teams, the practical question is whether a shared bank fraud information sharing platform changes alert volumes, detection speed and the evidence available to investigators. The founders have not published performance figures or a data schema.

Dominik Hennen, Head of Personal Banking at Deutsche Bank, said fraud can be contained more effectively when banks can securely share relevant findings with one another.

Who can join and what remains undisclosed

The services are not limited to the three founders. The founders said existing and future solutions are meant to be offered to other financial institutions and obliged entities, and that more participants make the shared information more valuable. Obliged entities are the firms that anti-money laundering (AML) law requires to run checks and report suspicious activity.

The founders have not said which institutions are in talks to join, what membership costs, or in what technical format banks will submit and retrieve findings. They did not state the legal form of the company or each shareholder’s stake.

Joachim Schmalzl, Executive Member of the Board at DSGV, framed the move as an industry matter.

“security in payments is not a matter of competition but a shared responsibility of the banking industry.” Joachim Schmalzl, Executive Member of the Board, DSGV

Mule accounts or typologies: what the first product covers

The founders said the first use case covers phishing, investment fraud, merchandise fraud and love scams. Their example of an account used fraudulently suggests account-level findings are in scope, which would bring in money mule activity. The announcement does not use the term, and it does not say whether the platform carries account identifiers, patterns or both.

That distinction decides how useful the platform is for mule account detection. Typologies help models and analysts recognize a scheme. Account-level data lets a receiving bank act on a specific customer, which is also where data protection risk is highest.

Legal frame for bank fraud information sharing

The announcement does not name a legal basis under the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679). It points to purpose limitation, data minimization and controlled disclosure, which are the principles Article 5 of the regulation sets for processing personal data. The MPC design is intended to limit how much personal data any participant sees.

The bank fraud information sharing platform sits next to a pilot the same banks already know. In June 2025, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and N26 started the safeAML pilot in Hesse, run by the state-owned data trustee EuroDaT. It processes data in pseudonymized form so that only the requesting bank can re-identify it, and the state said it avoids processing personal data. It was built to reconstruct money flows across banks for AML purposes. The new venture’s first application targets fraud.

The venture will not replace public action. The founders said it complements measures by government bodies and supervisors. They did not say whether Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin, has reviewed the design, and no approval is stated. BaFin has been an active enforcer against the largest banks, as in its €8 million fine on Deutsche Bank over the Postbank IT migration.

The wider EU rulebook on sharing fraud data

The EU’s AML Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, includes rules for information-sharing partnerships among obliged entities. It covers money laundering and terrorist financing, so it applies to fraud sharing only where that overlaps with laundering. The rules take effect from July 2027, when the new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) framework is also being phased in. Teams can read more in RegTech Post’s guide to what AMLA means for compliance data.

The payments side is moving as well. The European Commission’s proposal for a Payment Services Regulation (PSR) includes fraud data sharing between payment service providers and refund rules for certain scams. Council and Parliament negotiators reached a provisional agreement on November 27, 2025. In that compromise, providers exchange fraud data under sharing arrangements where there are reasonable and objective grounds to suspect fraud. Refunds are limited to cases where a scammer impersonates the customer’s own bank or its staff.

The founders said changes in the European legal framework, particularly payment-sector rules on information exchange to combat fraud and money laundering, are expected to create further opportunities. A bank fraud information sharing platform already running when those duties apply would give member banks a way to meet them.

The US has a comparable mechanism in Section 314(b), which allows financial institutions to share information on suspected money laundering under a safe harbor. Europe has had no equivalent at this scale for fraud.

What comes next for the German venture

Watch for the company’s name, its shareholding, the first group of outside banks and the date the first application goes live. Those details will show whether the savings banks’ roughly nationwide reach translates into data that mid-sized lenders and payment firms want to use.

The PSR text is the other date to track. Its final adoption and publication will set when fraud data sharing and refund liability become binding for German banks, and therefore how much pressure there is to join a shared platform.