Partly—but the broad promise is not established. A defined group of authorities can access specified bank-account information across EU member states for certain serious-crime purposes. That can help locate accounts. It does not prove that banks everywhere can reconstruct any stolen payment’s path in seconds, expose no customer-related data, or automatically freeze and return the money.
To assess the proposal, separate five outcomes that are often blurred together: detecting a suspicious payment, finding an account, tracing a chain of transfers, freezing funds, and reimbursing the victim. A system might speed up one without accomplishing the others.
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What does “trace stolen money” mean?
The phrase can describe several different operations, each needing different information, permissions, and response mechanisms. A bank-account register can help identify where an account exists and who holds or controls it. Reconstructing how money moved requires transaction records from the institutions and payment systems through which it passed.
| Operation | What it establishes | What it does not establish by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Detect a suspicious payment | A payment or account activity may warrant review. | That the payment is fraud, or where the money went afterward. |
| Locate an account | An account exists at a particular institution, with relevant account information. | A complete transaction history or that funds remain available. |
| Reconstruct a transaction chain | How recorded transfers moved between accounts or providers. | That every intermediary has compatible, accessible records or that the recipient is the fraudster. |
| Freeze an account or funds | Funds may be prevented from moving, if the relevant authority and process permit it. | That a victim will receive the money back. |
| Recover funds | Money is returned through an applicable process. | A result guaranteed by finding an account or issuing a fraud alert. |
The EU legal framework includes asset tracing and freezing among specified serious-crime tasks, but that is not a promise of automatic customer reimbursement. The distinction matters whether the case is an unauthorized transfer, an account takeover, or an authorized push-payment scam in which a victim was manipulated into approving the payment.
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What the EU example actually allows
Directive (EU) 2024/1654 provides for designated competent authorities to access and search relevant bank-account information in other member states through the Bank Account Registers Interconnection System (BARIS), where necessary for specified serious-crime tasks. The consolidated text of Directive (EU) 2019/1153 sets out the relevant purposes and conditions, including tracing and freezing assets.
This is a constrained legal-access model, not a public lookup tool or a universal bank-to-bank fraud network. Access is limited to designated authorities, authorized staff, defined purposes, and information within the legal scope. The framework also calls for confidentiality, data protection, security, and logging, with data minimisation for cross-border register access.
There is an important boundary: account-register access can help answer “where is an account?” It is not the same thing as continuously searching payment records across all banks and providers to reconstruct every hop of a transaction. EU legislation recognizes that differing transaction-record formats hamper cross-border financial investigations.
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Can it happen “in seconds”?
In the EU framework, the relevant legal text describes access as “direct and immediate” in its defined setting. That describes a form of access to account information; it is not a universal end-to-end performance guarantee for detecting fraud, matching records, tracing funds, obtaining a freeze, or returning money.
The Bank for International Settlements’ Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI), in its 2026 report Enhancing cross-border payments – addressing fraud, identifies practical barriers to real-time coordination: fragmented data, legacy infrastructure, limited operational capabilities, weak automation in pre-transaction checks, and immature beneficiary and payment-route pre-validation. The report also says privacy-law and regulatory differences hinder cross-border data exchange and a common real-time fraud-registry interoperation across fast payment systems.
That is evidence of obstacles, not proof that faster coordination is impossible. It does mean that “seconds” needs a stopwatch definition. For a meaningful claim, specify the starting event and endpoint: seconds from a customer report to an alert, from an alert to an account match, from a match to a freeze request, or from a request to a confirmed freeze. Those are different service levels. The cited official material does not establish a universal seconds-level benchmark, coverage rate, false-positive rate, or recovery rate.
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Can tracing happen without sharing customer data?
Not in the absolute sense. A system that locates accounts or follows transfers must process financial information connected to customers. Privacy safeguards can limit what is disclosed, who may access it, and why; they cannot make the underlying data use disappear.
A more precise privacy question is whether the system can answer a narrowly defined fraud query while exposing only the information needed to authorized parties, under a lawful basis, with access controls and an audit trail. The EU example supports controlled access and data minimisation. It does not validate a particular technical design that would allow all banks to trace all payments without exchanging or processing customer-related information.
The BIS CPMI report makes the cross-border trade-off explicit: “Data fragmentation is further exacerbated by different privacy laws and regulatory frameworks, which mean that PSPs cannot easily share data across borders, thereby hindering the establishment of a common, real-time fraud registry interoperation across FPS.” A workable proposal has to address both data protection and the fragmented rules and records that currently complicate coordination.
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What the proposal must specify to be testable
Before treating “seconds” or “without sharing customer data” as demonstrated, ask for concrete answers to these questions:
- What counts as tracing? Does the system find an account, rebuild a transaction chain, flag a suspected mule account, support a legally authorized freeze, or return money? Report each result separately.
- Which fraud cases trigger it? Unauthorized transfers, account takeover, authorized push-payment scams, and laundering after theft may involve different signals and procedures.
- Which jurisdictions and payment networks participate? Name the countries, currencies, banks, non-bank payment providers, and instant-payment systems covered. A cross-border claim is only as broad as its participating network and legal permissions.
- Who can make a query? Specify whether the requester is a sending bank, receiving bank, payment operator, police service, financial intelligence unit, or another competent authority—and identify the legal basis and who can see the result.
- What data is exposed? List the minimum fields, whether the exchange is raw transaction detail or a limited identifier or alert, how identity matching works, and how errors or false positives are corrected.
- How is speed measured? Publish the start and end points, participating-institution coverage, match and false-positive rates, time to freeze, and recovery outcomes. Do not treat a fast account lookup as proof of fast recovery.
- What safeguards and oversight apply? Explain access restrictions, confidentiality, security controls, logging, data minimisation, retention, and how misuse is detected and addressed.
For comparison, evaluate any proposed system against those same axes: account-register lookup versus transaction-chain access; permitted users and purposes; network coverage; information exposed and retained; record interoperability and latency; safeguards and oversight; and whether the outcome is identification, a freeze, or recovery.
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The EU’s transfer-of-funds rules apply to transfers sent or received by payment service providers established in the EU. The EUR-Lex summary describes a general five-year period for retaining relevant personal data, subject to exceptions under national law. That is a scoped retention rule; it is neither a worldwide standard nor evidence that records are interoperable or available in real time.
Technology is not the only route to cooperation. The BIS Financial Stability Institute’s 2025 executive summary on digital fraud notes that cross-border law-enforcement cooperation can also use mutual legal assistance requests for individual cases. Such case-based processes are distinct from a shared instant-payment fraud network.
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