A chat with Prembly’s Lanre Ogungbe on weaponising shared intelligence with FraudLens

The new CBN fraud and liability framework now places the onus on the banks, resulting in a fierce battle between a highly collaborative, sophisticated network of fraudsters sharing cheap, cutting-edge tools to breach digital vaults.

On the other side sits a fragmented defensive line of traditional banks and nimble fintech platforms, historically divided by fierce competition and a deeply entrenched culture of secrecy.

The structural weakness of this setup has long been obvious: when a fraudster is caught on one platform, the victimised institution frequently covers up the incident to shield its brand equity, allowing the criminal to simply move down the street and deploy the same exploit on a rival.

“Fraud thrives in hiding,” says Lanre Ogungbe, founder and CEO of Prembly (parent brand of YC-backed Identitypass), a leading African compliance and digital security infrastructure company.

In an exclusive interview with Technext, Lanre dismantled the legacy philosophies of financial defence and outlined how his company’s new utility, FraudLens, aims to structurally upend the balance of power.

For decades, the standard playbook for a banking executive facing a cyberattack or insider fraud has been immediate damage control and strict information containment. The prevailing industry theory was that proprietary fraud data constituted a strategic advantage, a secret recipe to be guarded.

He strongly challenges this logic.

“It’s not yet a proven fact that keeping fraud data to yourself as a business is an advantage; in fact, we’ve had more reports about it being a disadvantage. You can’t be an island of knowledge.”

The major flaw in operating in isolation, according to Ogungbe, is the deeply interconnected nature of modern digital transactions. No financial institution is an island. A single credit card swipe, ATM withdrawal, or cross-border transfer routinely ropes in four to six distinct entities, from core payment processors and switchboards to mobile money agents and settlement banks.

When an institution buries a breach report to protect its immediate reputation, it creates an intelligence blind spot that imperils its entire vendor and partner pipeline and eventually brings the risk right back to its own doorstep.

Regulatory bodies like the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) are aggressively pushing to eliminate this culture of silence.

Yet, regulatory mandates alone risk dissolving into performative, checkbox compliance if businesses do not see a clear strategic incentive to open up.

Ogungbe believes the shift must be philosophical, driven by the realisation that collective security directly protects the bottom line.

“If we want to have a much more secure ecosystem, it definitely has to come from the consumer side, the banking side, and any digital interfacing business,” he notes. “We need to encourage the idea of sharing cyberattacks.”

How FraudLens fixes it with real-time data

Rather than treating threat data as archival files to be audited months after an exploit, FraudLens treats fraud signals as active ammunition that must be deployed immediately across the network.

The platform relies on real-time integration. The moment a fraudulent actor or anomalous process is detected and verified on one platform, the signal is instantly distributed across the entire ecosystem via automated APIs and embedded software scanning modules. This creates an immediate shield against mirrored attacks.

To illustrate the systemic power of this shared framework, Ogungbe points to a simple, human scenario within a workplace:

“Imagine right now the three of us work in the same organisation, and one of our accounts has been hacked, and you keep it away from both of us. Yes, you could recover your account, but both of your other colleagues were still very much potential victims of that same incident. But imagine a world where the moment your account was taken over, you report it, and your other colleagues could immediately go reset their credentials and passwords.”

By scaling this logic up to an entire national financial architecture, FraudLens ensures that an exploit weaponised against a nascent fintech startup instantly triggers defensive recalibrations inside tier-one traditional banks, freezing the fraudster out of the system before they can jump from one platform to another.

Balancing open intelligence with data privacy

For risk compliance officers and legal experts, pooling sensitive financial data raises immediate red flags regarding user privacy and regulatory liabilities under strict data protection frameworks like the NDPR. Vetting the integrity of data and preventing its weaponisation at a central level are critical operational challenges.

Prembly handles this through a multi-layered governance and technical architecture. Crucially, FraudLens functions as a secure, anonymous advisory utility rather than an exposed, centralised blacklist. The private, personally identifiable information (PII) of consumers is never automatically broadcast to the wider network.

Instead, the platform relies on strict data encryption both at rest and in transit, leveraging Prembly’s deep institutional infrastructure in processing millions of identity verifications globally each month. The system strictly manages consent across the ecosystem, requiring submitting businesses to maintain rigorous, legally compliant consent pipelines that align with data protection laws.

Furthermore, the intelligence shared across the network is abstracted into high-level, actionable risk markers. “All we are exposing to the contributors of this open-source solution is strictly recommendations,” Ogungbe explains. “An account ending with 615 has been reported by five other institutions to have done A, B, C; that is it. Nothing else.”

This ensures that the final credit or risk decision remains entirely decentralised, governed by each bank or fintech’s distinct internal risk and compliance frameworks.

The urgency of adopting a shared intelligence model is amplified by the democratisation of advanced technology.

Financial criminals are no longer just isolated hackers writing bespoke scripts; they are highly automated operations leveraging artificial intelligence.

Today, bad actors can deploy sophisticated AI tools capable of generating synthetic identities, executing hyper-targeted social engineering campaigns, and bypassing static biometric defences for next to nothing.

“Some of the damages that some of these latest technologies can do, as low-cost as they are, are very damaging. On the other side of the bad players, it’s almost literally rewarding because now they don’t have to build; it’s sophisticated in its way, but then the cost is ridiculously low, less than 3 dollars.”

Also read: Fraud: Stakeholders want Nigeria’s financial ecosystem to pivot to adaptive intelligence