Written reply to Parliamentary Question on whether COSMIC may be designed for use by gatekeepers such as law firms, trust and company service providers and accounting firms

Date: For Parliament Sitting on 7 May 2024

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Mr Murali Pillai, MP, Bukit Batok SMC

Question:

To ask the Prime Minister whether a digital platform for the collaborative sharing of money laundering, terrorism and proliferation financing information and cases along the lines of MAS' Collaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/Terrorism Financing (ML/TF) Information and Cases (COSMIC) may be designed for use by gatekeepers such as law firms, trust and company service providers and accounting firms to increase these gatekeepers' ability to detect and deter criminal activity and preserve Singapore's reputation as a trusted financial centre.

Answer by Mr Lawrence Wong, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, and Chairman of MAS:

1. MAS' Collaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/Terrorism Financing (ML/TF) Information and Cases (COSMIC) is a platform for participating banks to share customer information with each other to detect and prevent significant financial crime cases. It targets the risk of criminals exploiting information silos in banks to open or control accounts across multiple banks, and to make illicit transactions through them. COSMIC will better enable these activities to be detected and disrupted across the banking sector.

2. As such information sharing has an impact on customer confidentiality, COSMIC has been carefully designed and implemented, with due consideration for its governance, effectiveness, and safeguards to ensure the proper use and safekeeping of the information shared. Participating banks also need to build confidence in each other that information shared will be carefully safeguarded. MAS is taking a phased approach, starting with six major commercial banks, before considering the expansion of COSMIC to a wider segment of the financial sector in subsequent phases.

3. There is potential to study the usefulness of such a model for other sectors at a later stage. But we will focus on implementing this for banks first, learn from the experience and ensure that it works well, before considering if it can be applied to other sectors.

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