A digital sharing platform is being developed by Singapore’s central bank in a move to help fight money laundering and other financial maneuvers that fund illegal activity.
The platform, expected in the first half of 2023, will exchange data with six of the region’s largest commercial financial institutions (FIs), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said in a statement on Friday (Oct. 1).
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“A common challenge that FIs in most jurisdictions face is that they are unable to warn one another about unusual activity in customers’ accounts. This gap is frequently exploited by financial criminals to make illicit transactions through a web of entities with accounts in different FIs, such that each FI on its own does not have sufficient information to detect these transactions in a timely manner,” the MAS said.
Named COSMIC — Collaborative Sharing of ML/TF Information and Cases — the platform will give banks the ability to share data about customers and transactions whenever “material risk thresholds” are surpassed.
Loo Siew Yee, assistant managing director of policy, payments and financial crime, said that COSMIC will enable the central bank to more easily spot and curtail anything untoward while minimizing the impact on those conducting legitimate business.
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“The information sharing framework is designed to target serious criminal behaviors and allow FIs to more quickly detect the bad actors to purge and deter them. It will strengthen Singapore’s position as a trusted financial center and place to do business, where FIs can better serve the vast majority of legitimate customers,” she said in the statement.
The COSMIC platform was co-created by MAS and commercial banks DBS, OCBC, UOB, SCB, Citibank and HSBC. The data shared across the platform will only be used for the purpose of combating money laundering, terrorism financing and proliferation financing.
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