Banks, payment processors and fintechs have long relied on Know Your Customer (KYC) processes to verify identity and assess the risk of doing business with the customer during onboarding, and on Know Your Business (KYB) processes to validate business legitimacy.
But today, that’s no longer enough.
While real-time payments, open banking and global transaction flows have created unprecedented convenience for customers, they’ve also opened the door to faster, more sophisticated financial crime as fraudsters attack through legitimate front doors using stolen identities, synthetic profiles and mule accounts that pass initial checks. Indeed, according to data from our friends at Sumsub, 76 percent of fraud happens after onboarding.
That’s where Know Your Transaction (KYT) comes in. KYT refers to the continuous monitoring and analysis of financial transactions to detect suspicious or anomalous behaviour. Rather than focusing solely on identity and due diligence, KYT focuses on activity and carrying out continuous checks to inform real-time risk scoring — how, when, where and why money moves.
By analyzing behavioral consistency and transaction patterns such as frequency, velocity, counterparties and device signals, KYT enables financial institutions to identify risks that static identity and basic authentication checks simply can’t capture. The key objective is that suspicious transactions are flagged and blocked before they are authorized. This shifts fraud prevention from a reactive investigation process to a proactive, predictive defense.
How is this best accomplished? Keep reading to learn more.
Why KYT is critical in today’s payments landscape
Faster payments leave no room for delays
From Brazil’s Pix and India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to Indonesia’s BI-FAST and Colombia’s Bre-B, real-time and near-instant payment rails are becoming the norm. According to a study by Juniper Research, the total value of money moving through instant payments is on track to surpass the $100 trillion mark in 2029, up from $60 trillion in 2025.
Because of this, the window to detect fraud is shrinking dramatically. Fast-moving funds equate to instant and irreversible fraud, with traditional batch-based monitoring systems that flag activity hours or days later no longer being viable. Fraud must be detected as it happens, not after funds are stolen.
The rise of mule account networks
Mule accounts have become a cornerstone of modern fraud operations. Often opened with legitimate credentials, these accounts are used to receive and rapidly transfer illicit funds across networks, making detection and recovery difficult.
KYT plays a critical role in identifying mule activity by flagging patterns such as:
- Sudden unusual spikes in transaction volume
- Rapid movement of funds across multiple accounts, including immediate withdrawals after deposits
- Repeated transfers to newly added recipients or suddenly reactivated dormant accounts
- Short gaps between inbound and outbound transactions
- Shared device fingerprints across accounts
- Anomalous login behavior, including high-risk geolocations or IP addresses
These signals often only emerge at the transaction level, and not during onboarding.
Increasing regulatory expectations
Regulators around the world are placing greater emphasis on ongoing transaction monitoring as part of anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) programs. The United Arab Emirates, for instance, recently implemented a new AML law, while a recent report from the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) confirmed that Saudi Arabia has made fundamental changes to its AML/CFT law to bring its legal and institutional framework in line with FATF’s updated recommendations.
With financial institutions expected to not only identify suspicious activity, but to do so quickly and accurately, KYT is becoming a foundational requirement. For example, it is a cornerstone of TrustNET, a unified AI-driven platform that combines identity verification, compliance orchestration, payment fraud prevention and real-time transaction monitoring into a single framework. Created through a strategic partnership between Ghana-based BlueSPACE, INETCO and Sumsub, TrustNET integrates global technology expertise with regional fintech leadership to help financial institutions strengthen security, meet regulatory requirements and deliver trusted digital financial services across Africa. According to a report published by AfricaNenda Foundation in partnership with the World Bank Group and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, as of late 2025 Africa has 36 live instant payment systems across 31 countries, with around 19 more under development. These systems processed 64 billion transactions in 2024.
Legacy systems have blind spots
Many traditional fraud systems rely on limited data, siloed visibility or rule-based detection that has very limited data elements to evaluate. This makes it challenging for teams in fraud prevention to adapt to new attack patterns. As fraud becomes more dynamic, automated and coordinated, these systems fall behind.
Modern fraud prevention requires access to real-time granular data, behavioural analytics and adaptive intelligence.
What effective KYT looks like
A robust KYT strategy goes far beyond silo-based retrospective monitoring. It requires fraud analysis at the individual transaction level, including:
- Continuous real-time transaction monitoring across the end-to-end transaction journey and across all channels
- Field-level visibility to analyze granular data elements related to the individual messages sent as part of a payment journey
- Behavioural models that constantly self-learn after every transaction to identify new fraud patterns and emerging threats
- Individual machine learning models built to perform analysis per entity (e.g. account, card, device, terminal) to deliver more accurate and dynamic risk scoring
- The incorporation of analyst decisions into model training, ensuring that human expertise continuously improves detection accuracy
- Automated alerting and workflow-driven investigation response mechanisms
- Real-time risk advice for every transaction and explainable AI for transparent, high-fidelity decisioning that provides clear reasoning for actions taken
- Precise controls such as alerts, facilitation of step-up verification, throttling or transaction blocking for high-risk payments with early signals linked to money mule indicators
Together, these capabilities allow financial institutions to move from reactive detection to proactive prevention.
How INETCO BullzAI enables real-time KYT
INETCO BullzAI provides the infrastructure and intelligence needed to bring KYT to life in modern payment environments. Key features include:
Real-time transaction monitoring: INETCO BullzAI monitors transactions as they occur across ATMs, POS systems, digital banking channels and payment networks, ensuring that suspicious activity can be identified and stopped instantly.
Deep transaction visibility: By decoding and analyzing transaction message data at a granular level, INETCO BullzAI delivers a comprehensive view of each transaction journey. This level of visibility allows institutions to detect subtle anomalies that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Detection of complex fraud patterns: INETCO BullzAI’s analytics capabilities are designed to identify multi-vector fraud scenarios, including:
- Mule account networks
- Account takeover attempts
- Bot-driven attacks
- Anomalous transaction flows
These patterns often span multiple systems and touchpoints requiring a unified real-time view.
AI-driven behavioural analysis: Adaptive models continuously learn from transaction behaviour, enabling more accurate risk scoring and reducing false positives. This helps institutions focus on real threats without disrupting legitimate customers.
Transaction intelligence is critical to fraud prevention
As financial crime becomes more automated, distributed and data-driven, siloed approaches to compliance will continue to fall short. That’s why continuous real-time transaction intelligence is the only way forward.
By combining real-time monitoring, deep transaction visibility and adaptive analytics, INETCO BullzAI empowers organizations to detect threats earlier, respond faster and prevent fraud before it impacts customers or the bottom line.
In a world where money moves instantly, security has to move even faster to maintain confidence and trust.
If your payment fraud strategy still relies on static rules or delayed reviews, now is the time to evolve. Learn how INETCO BullzAI can help you stay ahead of payment fraud and compliance risk in 2026 and beyond by scheduling a demo today.
