This research commission by the Swift Institute and written by Nick Maxwell, Head of the RUSI Future of Financial Intelligence Sharing (FFIS) programme, highlights the impact of platforms that allow banks to share information among each other to help identify financial criminals. Since 2020, collaboration platforms have had significant success in identifying crime, but – overall – the report finds that information-sharing is too limited where it occurs, and it is only possible in a handful of countries.
It is the first large survey of both AML and fraud prevention private-private information-sharing platforms – covering 15 different initiatives across the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Estonia and Australia.
Key insights of the report:
• Private-private information sharing to detect economic crime is accelerating around the world; with 7 out of the 15 platforms surveyed being established since 2020.
• Most recent innovation is occurring in the U.S., the Netherlands, Singapore and Estonia.
• Early indicators of impact, which are published for the first time in this study, are very promising. For example:
o Transactie Monitoring Nederland (TMNL) (a joint transaction monitoring utility between five major Dutch banks) has contributed to 85% time-saving efficiency gains in financial intelligence tasks.
o Innovation in the U.S., through the Collaborative Investigations Model, has demonstrated that – when initiated by a law enforcement case – private sector collaboration can identify, on average, 5 times the number of subjects related to a potential money laundering network than were originally known to law enforcement investigators.
o Other innovations in the U.S. are demonstrating that, through the use of privacy enhancing technology, queries can take place to consortiums of financial institutions, without the details of the query being disclosed in the process and response times are being reduced to automated and instant replies, compared to previous processes that took weeks or months to receive replies.
o Fraud-prevention platforms in the UK are leading to billions of pounds (GBP) of loss to fraud being identified and prevented.
Read the full survey here
Institution(s):
- Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)