KYT: Why Knowing Your Transaction Matters in the Era of Real-Time Payments

As scams rise and stolen money moves instantly, Know Your Transaction (KYT) is evolving from a compliance necessity into a critical source of fraud intelligence.

The United Nations estimates that between 2% and 5% of global GDP (up to €1.9 trillion) is laundered through the global financial system every year. At the same time, money mule activity continues to accelerate. UK financial institutions identified more than 225,000 mules in 2024 alone—a 22% increase year over year.

Pure AML problem? Not really. Fraud generates the proceeds, and money laundering helps criminals keep them. From investment and romance scams to account takeover attacks, most fraud schemes rely on mule accounts to move stolen funds beyond the reach of victims, financial institutions, and law enforcement.

As a result, visibility into transaction flows has become as much a fraud challenge as a compliance one. And this is where Know Your Transaction comes in.

What Is “Know Your Transaction”

Know Your Transaction (KYT) is an operational practice that helps financial institutions meet anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) requirements. It focuses on identifying unusual, suspicious, or potentially illicit transactions that may indicate money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, or other forms of financial crime.

Simply put, KYT focuses on understanding how money moves and whether those movements present signs of financial crime.

Achieving this requires a range of capabilities, including transaction monitoring, fraud intelligence, and investigative processes that help build a clearer picture of transaction activity and risk.

Why Is KYT Important for Fraud

Historically, KYT has been viewed primarily as an AML and CTF capability. But as fraud operations evolve, visibility into transaction flows is becoming increasingly valuable to fraud teams as well. There are several reasons for this:

1. A legitimate customer doesn’t guarantee a legitimate transaction

For years, financial crime controls have focused heavily on Know Your Customer (KYC)—i.e., verifying who the customer is. But when a legitimate customer makes a payment under false pretenses, KYC checks can work exactly as intended. The customer is genuine. The authentication is valid. Yet the payment is still fraudulent. As authorized push payment (APP) fraud continues to rise globally, this limitation is becoming harder to ignore.

In these scenarios, it’s the transaction itself that needs to be scrutinized, not the person initiating it.

2. Money laundering is a fundamental part of fraud

Although fraud fighters often think of fraud as ending when the money leaves the victim’s account, the fraud is far from over at that point. In reality, the operation continues through mule accounts, layering networks, crypto exchanges, cross-border transfers, and cashout operations.

In true fraud lifecycle fashion, that money then flows back into the criminal business, financing infrastructure, personnel, technology, and other investments that allow fraud operations to perpetuate and scale.

3. Fraud and money laundering now share the same decision window

Before real-time payments, financial institutions often had hours, or even days, to review suspicious transactions. AML teams could investigate alerts, place holds, or intervene before funds disappeared. With real-time payments now firmly established in many countries and rapidly expanding in others, that window is shrinking or disappearing altogether.

As a result, fraud detection and AML investigation are moving closer together. Increasingly, both disciplines are being asked to answer the same question: should this transaction be trusted?

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Seeing Beyond Individual Fraud Cases

Consider a typical impersonation scam: A customer receives a call from a fake bank employee and sends $15,000.

Behavioral intelligence may identify signs of manipulation before the payment is sent. At the same time, transaction analysis may reveal that the destination account:

• Has appeared in previous fraud investigations, either within the institution or through intelligence-sharing initiatives.
• Shares characteristics commonly associated with mule activity.

Neither system has the full picture on its own. Behavioral intelligence helps explain why the customer is sending the money. KYT provides additional context about the transaction and where the funds are likely to go.

This is why KYT matters beyond AML compliance. It helps fraud teams understand not only who has been targeted, but also where the money is going and how criminal networks move and launder stolen funds. That broader visibility can reveal emerging fraud campaigns, laundering infrastructure, and connections between seemingly unrelated fraud cases.

Adapting KYT to Real-Time Fraud

In a modern risk landscape, traditional after-the-fact transaction reviews no longer suffice and can lead to regulatory fines, reputational damage, and increased fraud exposure.

To ensure effective KYT in the era of real-time fraud:

• Combine transaction monitoring with behavioral intelligence. Transaction data provides valuable context, but understanding how and why a payment is being made can significantly improve risk assessment, particularly in scam and authorized fraud scenarios.

• Adopt a risk-based approach to transaction monitoring. Focus investigative resources on high-risk transactions, suspicious transaction patterns, and potential mule activity rather than treating all alerts equally.

• Prioritize real-time decisioning. If payments settle in seconds, transaction monitoring must operate even faster and while funds are still recoverable, not after they have moved through laundering networks.

• Foster collaboration between fraud, AML, cyber, and compliance teams. As fraud and money laundering increasingly share the same decision window, effective teamwork becomes critical for identifying and disrupting criminal activity.

• Align KYT with broader KYC, AML, fraud, and cybersecurity strategies. KYT is most effective when it forms part of a risk management strategy.

How KYT Strengthens Financial Crime Strategy

As real-time payments compress decision windows and fraud operations become increasingly sophisticated, the same transaction can represent both a fraud event and the beginning of a money laundering operation. KYT provides the transaction visibility needed to evaluate both.

This visibility has direct financial implications. The earlier suspicious activity is identified, the greater the opportunity to intervene before funds disappear through laundering networks. In an environment defined by real-time payments, even small improvements in response times can have a meaningful impact on recovery efforts and fraud losses.

Perhaps most importantly, KYT helps shift fraud prevention from investigating individual incidents to understanding broader criminal activity. By connecting transactions, accounts, and patterns that might otherwise appear unrelated, it provides a broader view of financial crime risk. This broader view can strengthen fraud and financial crime strategies while helping reduce false positives and minimizing unnecessary customer friction.

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