OCBC, police use tech to boost fight against financial crime
To fight crime, it used to take law enforcement officers up to three months to get banking information from OCBC Bank for investigations.
But under a new collaboration between the bank and the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force (SPF), this will be cut down to just one to two days.
Project Poet stands for Production Orders: Electronic Transmission.
It incorporates artificial intelligence and data analytics, enabling investigators to spot trends and monitor and identify hidden relations and suspicious activities by specific customers or groups - some of whom might include terrorists.
Project Poet was launched yesterday by Mr T. Raja Kumar, deputy secretary (international and training) at the Ministry of Home Affairs.
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He said: "It is clear that criminals and terrorists will continue to become more sophisticated in their modus operandi, as well as in their ability to use technology to try to beat the system.
"So we, too, must take advantage of and harness the latest technologies to enable ourselves to effectively detect and disrupt such criminal and terrorist networks."
In a joint news release with the SPF yesterday, OCBC said retrieving the data for law enforcement previously took a longer time as it was manpower-intensive and done manually. But with technology and process automation, the turnaround time is shortened.
Ms Loretta Yuen, OCBC Bank's head of group legal and regulatory compliance, said criminals were operating with ever-increasing speed.
She said: "As a responsible business organisation, OCBC Bank worked on this solution, which not only helps make the process faster and easier on our end, but also helps law enforcement agencies do their work better and faster."
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