A Financial Services and Markets (Amendment) Bill was introduced in Parliament on Monday (Mar 20) to provide for information sharing when combating illicit financial activities.

These include preventing and detecting money laundering, terrorism financing and the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The new Bill, if passed, will empower the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to set up and maintain an electronic information-sharing system. It also sets out the circumstances under which MAS and a suspicious transaction reporting officer may obtain or access such information and how they can use the information.

In a separate statement on Monday, MAS said the new platform, named Cosmic (Collaborative Sharing of ML/FF Information and Cases), will allow financial institutions (FIs) to share information on customers who show suspicious behaviour. This will make it easier for FIs to detect potentially illicit transactions and warn each other of these activities.

At present, FIs are unable to alert each other to unusual activity in their customer accounts. This allows criminals to make unlawful transactions through a web of accounts with different FIs, and avoid detection by moving from one FI to another.

MAS said it will develop the information-sharing framework with DBS, OCBC, UOB, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank and HSBC.

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The Bill sets out the information provisions for the initial phase of Cosmic only. In this phase, all information sharing will be on a voluntary basis.

Cosmic will focus on three key financial crime risks in commercial banking – abuse of shell companies, misuse of trade finance for illicit purposes and proliferation financing.

Eventually, MAS plans to make some aspects of sharing compulsory. It also aims to progressively extend the platform’s coverage to more focus areas and FIs in subsequent phases, it added.