How industry data sharing can help detect and prevent financial crime

Money launderers typically use formation agents, shell companies, and complex corporate structures to conceal their identities and transactions, preferring to use multiple current accounts across different banks and transact in round balances under set thresholds. Currently banks can only see their own internal data, making it difficult to detect suspicious transactions which may span across various financial institutions.

Under the Small Business Enterprise Act of 2015, the UK’s largest named banks are mandated to share current account turnover data on a monthly basis. At Experian, we’ve been using this information to build “peer group” profiles, to help understand normal transaction behaviour for each company size and sector, and alerting when behaviour is outside the norm with an “adverse marker”. In combining these adverse markers with industry aggregate transaction data, we can better detect and prevent financial crime.

John Flynn, from financial crime consultancy Gracechurch, joins the discussion to highlight the current limitations of transaction monitoring and the potential impact of industry aggregate transaction data sharing.