LAS VEGAS — Ask John Carlson, a longtime security expert, now an executive vice president at BITS, the technology policy division of the Financial Services Roundtable, about his optimism level in regard to the ability of financial institutions to combat fraud today and the morning keynoter at Day 2 of the BAI Payments Connect conference said this, “There is more pessimism than there has been.”

He suggested at Tuesday's session that there are more worries about security and that “we face ever more sophisticated enemies.”

Carlson added that there are “rising cyber security threats” as well as “international organized crime rings” that, increasingly, are targeting mobile money movement and, said Carlson, there are vulnerabilities in mobile. “Criminals will exploit the weakest links.”

He admitted, incidentally, that mobile banking crime is more a threat than a reality from a crime standpoint now: “It's not there yet,” he said, meaning that known crimes remain very low in number. But criminal eyeballs are feasting on the possibilities. “This is the next wave of fraud.”

Carlson also said, in an aside, that a growing worry among financial institutions are “the reputation costs” associated with losses to criminals – and that, for some institutions, the hits to the reputation may be much more expensive than the money lost to crooks.

His core message: “We need to collaborate to fight the new threats.”

Fraud, he stressed, is continually evolving and financial institutions, he said, need to join together to respond with new defenses. Do that, he suggested, and the fight is still for the financial institutions to win.