OCBC has implemented an automated solution that accelerates collaboration with law enforcement agencies by up to 100-fold.
On average, it takes between 10 days and three months for banks to respond to production orders or requests by law enforcement agencies to provide information for investigation on the bank accounts of individuals or companies. With the new solution – Production Orders: Electronic Transmission (POET) – OCBC will cut turnaround time to just one or two working days with minimal manual processing assuming the information requested does not exceed 13 months.
By greatly reducing the turnaround time for production orders, we are doing our part to put the squeeze on criminals, said Loretta Yuen, OCBC’s head of group legal and regulatory compliance.
After a successful pilot, OCBC launched POET in collaboration with the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) in July 2019. Since then, it has extended collaboration to other agencies including the Singapore Customs, Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS), the Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau (CPIB) and various units under the Singapore Police Force. It is in collaboration with more than 10 law enforcement agencies and expects about 70 percent of production orders to come through POET.
Other banks are also considering to adopt the solution to improve compliance efficiency. In addition to DBS and UOB, the report noted that foreign banks in Singapore also expressed interest in POET.
Collaboration with regulators aside, Yuen also highlighted the benefit of data gathered by POET for banks not only to respond to requests but to identify compliance risk early.
We can use it as additional surveillance risk indicators, as well as in intelligence data mining and transactional link analysis to identify hidden relationships and/or clustering relationships that may pose money laundering risks to the bank, Yuen said.
On average, OCBC receives more than 1,000 production orders per month from law enforcement agencies and the figure is projected to rise in the coming years.