The UK’s biggest banks have joined forces with leading tech firms in a collaboration to counter fraud and protect consumers, build confidence, and drive UK economic growth.

Coming together under the banner of Stop Scams UK, the first wave sees major high street banks like HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide Building Society, NatWest, Barclays and Santander sign a joint statement to support intelligence sharing pilots.

Also signing on is UK challenger bank Monzo, alongside telcos BT and Three, as well as tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta, and Match Group.

By signing the joint statement, the firms are all pledging to invest in finance, data, and technology to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem that will lead to the wider dissemination of data.

“Through our pilot work to share fraud data between industry sectors, we have proved that collaboration gets ahead of the criminals and defeats fraudsters,” said Ruth Evans, chair of Stop Scams UK.

“By making this pledge, our members are redoubling their efforts to create a safer environment for all businesses and consumers online.”

The joint statement emphasises that now is the moment for companies to ‘accelerate, build and scale’ their fight against fraud, which, according to UK Government figures, now accounts for 41% of all estimated crime in England and Wales.

“Following a successful proof of concept we have developed a series of data and intelligence sharing pilots that are proving we can get ahead of fraudsters. Our partnerships will protect more customers, build greater consumer awareness and stop more criminals,” reads the statement.

The pledge builds on work already begun by the likes of Meta, which announced in October that it was entering an information-sharing partnership with UK banks in a ‘first of its kind’ initiative to help combat the rising tide of fraud across its social media platforms.

According to Meta, the partnership led to action against thousands of accounts run by scammers, with approximately 20,000 accounts removed based on data shared.

Commenting on the signing of this new pledge, Nathaniel Gleicher, global head of counter fraud at Meta, said: “At Meta, we are committed to creating a safe and secure online environment for all our community.

“Scams are a society-wide problem which requires industry, government and others to work together, and we will continue to expand and evolve our collaboration to stop fraudsters in their tracks.”

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Stop Scams UK’s initiative is the latest call for wider industry collaboration, following a coalition led by consumer group Which? last August, that brought together UK banks and telecoms providers in a landmark commitment to share data to combat fraud.

That group, which included Barclays, Nationwide, NatWest, Starling, UK Finance, Virgin Media O2 and Vodafone, called on ministers to do more to promote data sharing between individual companies, law enforcement agencies and government to close gaps in their systems.