Singapore central bank plans digital platform to fight money laundering

SINGAPORE, Oct. 1 (Reuters) – Singapore’s central bank on Friday announced it will introduce a digital platform for banks to share customer and transaction information, as part of efforts to prevent money laundering. money and financing of criminal activities.

The central bank plans to launch the platform in the first half of 2023.

This is a cooperation between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and six major commercial banks in the city-state – DBS Group (DBSM.SI), Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC.SI), United Overseas Bank (UOBH.SI), Standard Chartered Bank (STAN.L), Citibank (CN) and HSBC (HSBA.L), the MAS reported.

“The information sharing framework is designed to target serious criminal behavior and enable financial institutions to more quickly detect bad actors to purge and deter them,” said Loo Siew Yee, MAS deputy general manager for financial institutions. political payments and financial crime, in a statement. .

MAS said a common challenge facing financial institutions was that they were unable to notify each other of unusual activity in customer accounts. “This gap is frequently exploited by financial criminals,” he said.

Reporting by Anshuman Daga; Editing by Mark Heinrich

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