According to Moody’s, good data plays a key role in combating the rise in financial crime.
Wael Jadara, head of sales for Asia Pacific at Moody’s, told Digital Nation that with the right amount of data “you can always know who’s doing what.”
“Our role is to get more data, make that data richer, make that data more up to date, have more data sources and actually get a better picture of what’s going on out there,” Jadara said.
“Crime isn’t going away. If anything, criminals are getting more sophisticated.”
Jadara added that as criminals become more aggressive, “they are becoming bolder” and “can become much more destructive.”
“It’s always a game of cat and mouse,” Jadara said.
“They’re always finding new ways to commit crimes and they’re constantly evolving. We’re always trying to stay ahead of the curve. At the end of the day, data is data.”
“What we’re seeing more and more is the ability to aggregate all of this data and make it mean something bigger,” added Qing Liu, senior director and sales manager at Moody’s.
This allows Moody’s team to “detect patterns and be proactive rather than reactive.”
“One of the things we see often elsewhere, and which is being replicated in Australia with the Fintel Alliance, is a public-private partnership where government, businesses, financial institutions and banks all work together.”
The Fintel Alliance is an AUSTRAC strategy formed in 2017 to strengthen the financial industry’s capacity to tackle these issues and support police investigations.
“We believe that if we all connect the dots, we can detect risks and early warning triggers as they arise, as opposed to the current reactive situation where we only find out about a crime months after it has happened.”
Liu added that the ability to check the pattern will be what stops this pattern of behavior.
“One of the biggest issues we see is that there’s a bit of a gap in information sharing.
“We think that if that information were shared more easily, it could have a much bigger impact on things like money laundering and illegal activities in Phoenix,” Liu said.
Illegal phoenixing involves closing or abandoning a company to avoid paying debts before a new company can be formed to replace it without financial liability.
According to Liu, there are many illegal activities in Phoenix in the real estate industry.
“You hear a lot of stories in the real estate industry, not just from government agencies, but in the real estate and construction industry, of people setting up companies, making money from them, building and owning homes, then dissolving without making payments.”
“It’s like a phoenix rising from the ashes as a new company doing exactly the same thing,” Liu said.
