The Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Industry Partnership launched a paper to encourage greater adoption of data analytics solutions by financial institutions in Singapore.

The paper brings together the experiences of major banks in using data analytics techniques to combat financial crime, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) wrote in a media release on Thursday.

It provides an understanding of the current state of data analytics deployment in the area of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT), by sharing well-established use cases as well as more experimental work.

Growing Opportunities

«The MAS strongly encourages the use of data analytics in AML/CFT, which has the potential for bringing about transformative change in our approach to combating financial crime. The strong showing by analytics solutions providers during the recent Singapore Fintech Festival shows the growing opportunities to adopt such techniques,» Ho Hern Shin, Assistant Managing Director (Banking and Insurance), MAS and co-chair of ACIP, said 

The paper also provides examples of effectiveness improvements, such as the 40 percent reduction in false positives and 5 percent increase in true positives delivered by one bank’s proof-of-concept conducted on a machine learning solution for transaction monitoring.

Singapore's Resilience

«The industry must be ever vigilant against the abuse of our financial system and we hope that the paper will encourage the industry to build robust data analytic capabilities to strengthen Singapore’s resilience against such threats,» David Chew, Director, Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force and co-chair of ACIP, added.

The AML/CFT Industry Partnership (ACIP) is a private public partnership established in April 2017. It brings together the financial sector, regulators, law enforcement agencies and other government entities to collaboratively identify, assess and mitigate key and emerging money laundering and terrorism financing risks facing Singapore. The co-chairs are the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force and Monetary Authority of Singapore. ACIP’s Steering Group currently comprises the Association of Banks Singapore (ABS) and 8 banks. Expert working groups are created by the Steering Group to study identified areas of interest; these working groups induct members outside of the Steering Group to provide added expertise and wide-ranging perspectives.