Adviser trade body co-launches platform to fight financial crime in the UK
PIMFA, which represents 1,000 wealth managers and financial advisers in the UK, has co-launched a new intelligence sharing platform to prevent financial crime.
The Personal Investment Management & Financial Advice Association (PIMFA) decided to act as figures showed £193bn was lost to financial crime last year, with more than 630,000 reports to the national Crime Agency over 18 months to December 2017.
The statistics equate to an average of £3,900 per adult with losses occurring at £6,000 per second.
PIMFA has entered into a partnership with Financial Crime Intelligence (FCI) to launch a “ground-breaking” intelligence sharing platform to provide an “effective way for firms to prevent financial crime.”
This platform, called Pimfa-AECIS, allows users to anonymously compare and match against each other’s financial crime data. Where matches arise, firms can legally go on to share intelligence directly with each other.
“Being able to quickly identify repeat offenders to improve prosecution rates, reduce losses and provide targeted fraud prevention advice to vulnerable clients and repeat victims is an important step forward for our profession,” Richard Adler, director of strategic partnerships at PIMFA, said.
Chris Anderson, FCI’s chief executive warned that “the levels of financial crime are truly staggering and are growing at an exponential rate with emerging threats on the immediate horizon.
“The Pimfa-AECIS platform is a secure, effective tool for quickly identifying current, specific threats and criminal connections.”
The decision to launch this platform also follows new UK legislation in the Criminal Finances Act 2017 designed to protect regulated entities when they share information on money laundering suspicions.
