Singapore-Based Bank To Use Artificial Intelligence To Hunt Dirty Money

Josh O'Neill

21 July 2017

Singapore's 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.