Intelligence: The Key to Combatting Financial Crime

If the industry is to have any substantial impact in reducing the amount of financial crime across the globe, the real consensus is that intelligence must be shared.

There is clearly no doubt that with all parties collaborating and sharing information the fight against the criminals will be more cohesive and effective. The message right across the industry is that the politics and the competition should be left at the door when fighting financial crime.

What are the Benefits?

The benefits of this approach are clear. If data and intelligence is shared across all sectors, lessons can be learnt quickly. If institutions have the information which can bring to light fraud signals, then this must be shared for the common good. A proactive and preventative approach ought to be the way forward and it must be technology led, however bureaucracy can hamper technological advancement in crime prevention. This has been the case for decades but there must be a radical transformation.

If intelligence is shared it can highlight trends which can in turn help to create rules that can be fed into the technology. It’s widely recognised that the industry needs to move from a need-to-know basis to a responsibility to provide. This is not to say there is no information sharing going on now, but it needs to be taken to the next level by removing the silos so that the “gold dust” that is the data can have a more substantial impact on the criminals.

It’s not a technology challenge, it’s available and ever evolving, becoming as equally as sophisticated as the tech that’s at the criminal’s disposal. Although there is a level of willingness to be seen there are obstacles to overcome, primarily those regulatory and legal frameworks that are currently restricting the much-needed collaboration.

COMMON SCENARIOS

A common scenario could be where one bank’s bad customer is another bank’s good customer. An individual can be identified as a threat and off boarded by one bank and literally walk down the street and open an account with another bank to continue their nefarious activities. The first bank can notify the regulator but cannot warn the second bank about the potential threat to their business. If organisations don’t share with each other then the bad guys will target those that are in the dark. All parties need to be part of the enlightenment, the dots need to be joined, the data needs to be aggregated and it needs to be on an industrial scale.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

It perhaps couldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility to have one common utility that can share the information in real time rather than retrospectively. This all needs the political, cultural, and legal entities to come together as an ecosystem but must also include the technology, telecoms, and social media companies.

The message is clear, for there to be a significant uplift in the success rate in combatting the criminals the all-important information and data that forms the basis of the work currently underway needs to be shared and it needs to be done with urgency.