Poor cyber-fraud integration delays breach detection

Siloed security teams slow responses and expose organisations to rising fraud risk.

Delayed breach detection remains a critical vulnerability for organisations across Asia Pacific as cyber and fraud teams continue to operate in silos, despite the availability of advanced security tools.

Mastercard data shows that 67% of APAC leaders experience delays in breach notifications, while 83% report a lack of real-time integration between cyber and fraud teams. This disconnect often means breaches are only identified after financial losses have already occurred, increasing both direct fraud costs and downstream remediation risks.

Aditi Sawhney, Senior Vice President, Security Solutions, Asia Pacific at Mastercard, said the core issue is fragmented visibility across the broader security ecosystem. “Cyber security isn't something which one organisation can be responsible for themselves. Breaches happen across the ecosystem, and we're only as secure as our weakest link.”

Internal coordination failures further delay response times. “Even within an organisation, cyber and fraud teams today don't have alerts flowing quickly within themselves, and hence, breaches are identified only after fraud losses begin,” Sawhney said.

Organisational structures and incentives remain a major barrier. “The biggest challenge is coordination,” Sawhney said. “Cyber and fraud teams often sit in different systems, they have different KPIs, different reporting lines.” Without shared dashboards or orchestration layers, critical intelligence fails to move fast enough to prevent losses. “It's that quick flow of information that doesn't exist,” she said.

As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, Sawhney said integration has become a strategic necessity rather than an operational upgrade. “Fraud isn't where it starts. It's really upstream where there's cyber activity that's happening which is causing these downstream fraud losses,” she said.

Looking ahead, the scale of connected risk is accelerating. “As we look to 2030, you're going to have more than 40 billion devices and agents all connected to a large digital attack surface,” Sawhney said. “So it's going to be key more than ever to have this always-on cyber security in the background and proactive defenses.”