AUSTRAC commits to expanding analytics hub as core | Australian Markets

Australia’s financial crimes investigator and intelligence organisation AUSTRAC has vowed to develop its collaborative information analytics hub, making it a “central function” of its financial crimes struggle.

AUSTRAC has hailed the success of the Fintel Alliance, the public-private financial information sharing cooperative which it oversees, declaring its intention to construct out the alliance’s real-time information analytics hub.

Launched in 2017, the Fintel Alliance is a collaborative intelligence-sharing partnership between Australia’s main banks, remittance service suppliers and playing operators, alongside law enforcement and security companies in Australia and abroad.

AUSTRAC chief govt Brendan Thomas hailed the success of the data-sharing collective in successfully “pooling data, sharing insights, and targeting major threats to strengthen financial systems and law enforcement action”.

“This [partnership] has generated real intelligence across a range of serious crimes including money laundering, child sexual exploitation, domestic violence, tax evasion, fraud and illegal phoenixing.”

Thomas singled out the profitable rollout of Fintel’s information analytics platform, designed to determine legal patterns and trends throughout the financial sector.

The platform examined legal patterns from money deposits (underneath $10,000) transacted by the large 4 banks (CBA, Westpac, NAB and ANZ), with more than 50 million information factors examined.

“Using the combined datasets, new software, and with our analysts and bank analysts working together in the same room, we were able to see things that were not visible before. In just a few days we identified major criminal networks now subject to law enforcement action. This shows the power of intelligence partnerships and collective effort.”

Fintel Alliance Executive Board co-chair and ANZ group head of financial crime risk, Cassandra Hewett, welcomed the expanded capability to develop the platform’s instruments and “drive real-time responses, together”.

She mentioned the hub has enabled Fintel Alliance members to join to information “in ways that weren’t previously possible, providing real-time responses to criminal behaviour on already more than one occasion”.

Alongside the growth of the information hub, AUSTRAC can even commit to a useful resource increase to the Fintel Alliance, which it says will lay the groundwork for partnerships with Tranche 2 entities.

As half of the growth, a seconded senior supervisor from ANZ Bank will help co-lead and construct new pairings with industry and authorities members.

Recent successes

AUSTRAC singled out a quantity of profitable Alliance initiatives which have helped to fill gaps in its financial crimes identification and regulation.

The Fintel Alliance, it famous, produced a menace alert on money muling behaviour and recognized an increase in micro-laundering, a course of the place funds are co-mingled with reliable and illicit sources and moved at quantity by way of low-value digital transfers.

The Alliance additionally launched a marketing campaign on ‘scambling’, a follow the place unlicensed online playing platforms promote on social media and trick people to go to a rip-off web site to take part in playing.