The bank has partnered with two financial technology firms to test their innovative solutions.

Singapore's OCBC Bank has piloted two new solutions that use artificial intelligence to help tackle money laundering and terrorism financing, the latest push by lenders to utilise the burgeoning technology. 

Two fintechs involved in the project – BlackSwan Technologies and Silent Eight – leverage artificial intelligence to carry out research into individuals and entities suspected of illicit financing. 

This typically involves scouring for information on individual profiles and mapping how suspicious transactions may be connected to determine whether they are fraudulent or illegal. This usually falls under the remit of an internal compliance analyst, OCBC says, and can often take days because of manual processing. 

But OCBC claims its new solution can increase the productivity of an analyst by 100 per cent because, for example, the “desktop” component of research can be reduced from one hour to just one minute. The term desktop refers to due diligence carried out using a computer. 

Silent Eight helps automate the desktop research process by enabling analysts to digitally scan internet search engines, news sites, and internal and external databases to piece together suspicious individuals' dossiers within a minute. Artificial intelligence steps in to filter out irrelevant information, such as individuals with identical names.

Black Swann Technologies uses artificial intelligence to analyse suspicious transactions, mapping them to a network of related transactions to highlight potential connections with other individuals or companies which may have previously slipped under OCBC's radar. This can “simplify the task of the analyst and provide useful leads to follow up on,” OCBC said. 

“We felt that this ‘back office process’ of  transaction  monitoring  could  definitely  use  an  innovative  solution  to  help automate things and make  our  investigative  research  more  timely  and effective,” said Alex Ng, head of OCBC's group transaction surveillance. “Money  laundering  and  terrorism  financing  is  a  growing  area  of  concern,  with the  Monetary  Authority  of  Singapore  announcing  earlier  in  April  this  year  a government-industry effort to strengthen Singapore’s capabilities in identifying and  fighting  these  threats,  and  increasing our efficiency in doing  so.