The head of a risk assessment, analytics and tech firm, once part of Thomson Reuters, has sounded the alarm about the scale of financial crime and what must be done to beat it.

Hong Kong and other jurisdictions must put privacy laws on a common footing and bolster data protection to fight financial crooks, a businessman who heads a trading and data platform has said.

Financial crime costs the global economy more than $2.0 trillion a year, but banks have not seized the chance to share data with regulators over fears of breaching privacy laws or giving away information that could leave them open to lawsuits later on, David Craig, chief executive of Refinitiv, was quoted by the South China Morning Post as saying. 

Refinitiv, formerly the risk and financial arm of Thomson Reuters, is an example of the kind of business that sees opportunities in banks’ and other organisations’ need to beat off hackers and other crooks while not compromising client convenience and service quality.

“Our argument is that we need to have a lot of risk intelligence and data across the system – more than just meeting compliance requirements,” Craig was quoted as saying.

Refinitiv in May reported that organisations in 19 countries had spent 3.1 per cent of their turnover, or $1.28 trillion, to fight financial crime, covering bribery, corruption, money laundering, fraud, theft, cybercrime and human trafficking. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2018 Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey found that almost half (49 per cent) of organisations it had surveyed had been hit by financial crooks, up from 36 per cent when asked in 2016. (PwC polled 7,228 respondents around the world.)

Estimates of how much financial crime costs continue to grow - in 2015 the research firm Juniper pegged the global figure as reaching more than $2.1 trillion by 2019. In October 2017, a US firm called Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that cybercrime would cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.