Singaporean bank OCBC has piloted two fintech solutions to enhance its competency in fighting money laundering and terrorism financing.
The two financial technology companies involved, BlackSwan Technologies and Silent Eight, were part of the second fintech accelerator programme run by OCBC Bank’s fintech unit, The Open Vault at OCBC.
The companies leverage artificial intelligence to conduct research on individuals and entities suspected of illegal financing.
Detailed Mapping
This is done by searching for information on individual profiles, and mapping how suspicious transactions may be linked to one another to see if they are indeed fraudulent or illegal.
Today, this process is carried out manually by an internal compliance analyst. Suspicious transaction monitoring is complicated, time consuming and can take analysts anything from one hour up to two to three days to complete.
Increasing Efficiency
The fintech solutions speed things up significantly, for instance, the «desktop» component of the research can be reduced from one hour to just one minute, and can increase the overall productivity of an analyst by 100 percent.
Money laundering and terrorism financing is a growing area of concern, with the Monetary Authority of Singapore announcing earlier in April this year a government-industry effort to strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in identifying and fighting these threats.
Artificial Intelligence
Silent Eight, one of the solutions piloted, automates the desktop research process by enabling analysts to digitally scan Internet search engines, news sites and internal and external databases to put together the suspicious individual’s «dossier» within just a minute.
BlackSwan Technologies, the second transaction monitoring fintech solution, leverages artificial intelligence to analyse the suspicious transactions, mapping them to a network of related transactions to identify possible connections with other individuals or companies which may be atypical or previously unknown.
«We saw great potential in these two fintech start-ups. We felt that this back office process of transaction monitoring could definitely use an innovative solution to help automate things and make our investigative research more timely and effective,» said Alex Ng, Head of OCBC Bank’s Group Transaction Surveillance.
