The Future of Financial Information Sharing (FFIS) programme recently published its survey report ?Five years of growth in public-private partnerships to fight financial crime?, which traces the evolution of public-private partnerships (PPP) from 2015 to 2020.

This evolution was spearheaded in the UK through the creation of the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence Task Force (JMLIT) in 2015. As of June 2020, JMLIT has led to closures of 3400 accounts, £56 million in assets being seized or restrained and 210 arrests.

Following on from JMLIT, the report identified 23 further global partnerships involving 20 out of the top 30 global financial centres. Since the inception of JMLITs innovative pilot in 2015, PPPs have arguably become a key component of organisations? defence against financial crime.

However, despite the benefits of PPP between banks and national law enforcement agencies, AML experts have argued their impact on financial crime response has been relatively small to date and struggles to handle the scale and complexity of today's financial crime challenges.

Growing the model of PPPs is essential in tackling the current and projected trajectory of financial crime, However, questions remain as to the difficulties - both organisational and technical - PPPs must overcome within the next five years to ensure they maximise their effectiveness against such threats.

The real power of PPPs lies in their potential to improve joint awareness of financial crime threats. This can be achieved through sharing of information (e.g. data, models, intelligence, knowledge, insight) and then the fusion of that information resulting in better, faster, more accurate decisions.

So if information fusion is the key to success, what are the main barriers to success? In short, these are: (1) getting the right information from a PPPs multi-faceted information sources to the right place at the right time, and (2) applying collaborative analytics to mine the information for suspicious events.

It is arguable that PPPs are not maximising their current potential because information is only being fused at a strategic level, e.g. human expert data, and important (but weak) connections are being missed that could be exposed in low-level transaction data, for example by applying network analytics.        

In addition to the technical challenges associated with creating PPP fusion centres, such as. managing large-scale datasets and analytics, perhaps an even greater challenge is to resolve the associated policy and security challenges. However, solve them we must, because without strong and effective PPPs in place, criminals will surely exploit this to their advantage to escape detection.  

To find out more please join a webinar on 22 April (3:30pm UK time) organised by BAE Systems Applied Intelligence in partnership with UK Finance. Speakers include David Nicholson, Global Analytics Product Manager at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence and Karen Baxter, MD, Intelligence Strategy for Economic Crime at UK Finance.

To register click here: https://info.ai.baesystems.com/Information-Fusion-in-Financial-Crime-Register.html