Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea and Spain were among those mentioned as requesting to use Interpol’s Global Rapid Intervention of Payments (I-GRIP) system by Sungyong Kang, criminal intelligence officer, Interpol, during a panel at Sibos.
Kang was unable to release statistics for I-GRIP’s use during the session looking at collaboration for fighting financial crime, but said they hope to sometime soon. I-GRIP was launched in 2022 and allows countries to stop payments sent across borders.
“In the end, the ones who are making the request will be the will be the police of the requesting country where the victim is residing. So we are asking our member countries, as a requesting country, to let their police in the local offices to know about this existence of I-GRIP, because unless they know about its existence, they are not going to use it,” Kang urged.
Moderator Avalon Ingram, head of FCC experts, APAC and MEA, Swift, turned to another panelist Nitin Chugh, deputy managing director, State Bank of India – SBI, to discuss what India was doing for financial crime. Chugh discussed India’s Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System, which was launched in 2022.
Chugh explained, “We report our frauds on this portal, we share our data, and we are hoping that as time goes by, we will also be able to make use of this coordinated effort to bring our intelligence and make it collective intelligence.”
Discussing India’s real-time payment system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and how they are tackling fraud, Chugh commented, “It is very unlikely that an account takeover happens because somebody is hacked into your device or your account. People are willingly giving away money because of some threat or intimidation. Now that is not something that a rule engine can solve for, so you need to do scenario planning. The scenario planning then goes into these different systems, and we are now seeing that can be forecast which are the customers, and which are the accounts, which have the tendency of being used as mules.”
Ingram then looked to other panellist Carl Wocke, CEO, Merlynn Partner, a company which creates digital twins. He elaborated on what that means, “All the banks have got compliance challenges where these transactions will play out. You have a bottleneck around access to expertise to clear alerts.
“While we wait for the big data engines and the big AI engines to decipher and remove complexity, in the interim there's a need for people to be more accessible, for expertise to be more accessible. Essentially, what we've done, is to create a digital workforce out of your experts that can now work through a million alerts, and be available in a real time fashion.”
Wocke gave an example of how they’re working with intelligence agencies to tackle financial crime. He clarified, “What we've given them the ability to do, and what we're developing, is the ability for a law enforcement agent to operate within another agency in a digital form, so the law enforcement agency is able to share model of an expert to assist.”
In concluding, Kang gave a final piece of advice to countries to help Interpol with their I-GRIP system, “Many of our member countries are having difficulty figuring out who to reach out to when they receive an I-GRIP request… it would be nice if financial institutions can make some kind of general account which can be used to receive the I-GRIP request.”