The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global standard-setter for anti-money laundering, has called on governments and businesses to deepen their collaboration as digitalisation and rapid cross-border payments make illicit finance harder to police.
The watchdog’s new study, Information Sharing to Combat Illicit Finance: Global Overview of Public and Private Sector Partnerships and Data Protection Arrangements, explores how public-private partnerships (PPPs) and similar mechanisms allow countries and firms to spot, examine and dismantle criminal financial activity quickly and at scale.
The research counted a minimum of 84 such partnerships worldwide, with 52 of the jurisdictions surveyed operating at least one domestic PPP and 18 running several. According to the findings, these arrangements prove most durable and effective against money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing when underpinned by solid legal foundations, well-defined governance and technological innovation.
To spur wider uptake, the FATF maps out the various models in operation internationally and stresses that cooperation must extend beyond banks to virtual asset service providers, non-financial industries and unconventional participants such as telecom operators and digital platforms, particularly as fraud surges worldwide.
Over three quarters of reporting jurisdictions deploy PPPs to exchange strategic material like typologies, red flags and risk trends, while between 55% and 66% use them for operational purposes, covering case intelligence, suspicious transaction report indicators and customer due diligence or Know Your Customer data. Encrypted platforms and secure exchanges feature among the innovations bolstering these efforts.
Case studies underline the results such cooperation can deliver. Singapore’s Project FRONTIER+, a transnational anti-scam alliance spanning 13 jurisdictions, produced over 2,100 arrests, froze more than 36,000 bank accounts and seized roughly S$28.2m. In South Africa, a tactical operation group saw banks analyse suspicious client behaviour, leading to the collapse of a pyramid scheme and the freezing of 60 accounts worth over $450,000.
The report also points to tools that let authorities balance operational efficiency against data protection, privacy and human rights duties, urging countries to set common objectives and clear legal expectations, including senior-level engagement and joint guidance between AML/CFT and privacy regulators.
FATF president Giles Thomson said, “Public-private partnerships are helping to achieve results that would not otherwise be possible with information on financial crime in fragmented siloes across public and private sectors.
“I encourage countries to use public-private partnerships to build the trust, collaboration, and high-speed channels for information sharing needed to counter increasingly sophisticated criminal methods. This is essential to effectively disrupt and prevent illicit finance, especially the fast growing threat from fraud. I encourage governments around the world to draw on the good practices in this report and to think innovatively on how we can take the fight to the criminals.”
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