A new bill has been introduced in Singapore’s parliament that could lead to an information-sharing platform set up by the local financial regulator.
A financial services and markets bill was introduced in Singapore’s parliament on Monday for information-sharing to combat illicit activities such as money laundering, terrorism financing and the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
If passed, the bill will give the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) the power to create an electronic system and outline the circumstances in which the regulator and a suspicious transaction reporting officer can obtain or access such information as well as how they can use it.
Initial Phase
The bill covers the initial phase of the project which will only requires information-sharing on a voluntary basis with a focus on three key commercial banking risks: abuse of shell companies, misuse of trade finance for illicit purposes and proliferation financing.
Eventually, MAS plans to make some aspects of sharing compulsory and extend the platform’s coverage to more areas and financial institutions in later phases.
The MAS platform is named Cosmic (collaborative sharing of money laundering and terrorism financing information and cases) and its framework will be jointly developed with DBS, OCBC, UOB, Standard Chartered, Citibank and HSBC.
Bank-to-Bank Sharing
According to MAS, the Cosmic platform was developed to address the inability to share information about suspicious customer activity between banks.
«Financial criminals exploit these 'information silos' by making illicit transactions through a web of accounts in different financial institutions and moving from one financial institution to another to avoid detection,» the regulator said in a statement.
