UK Crime Agency, Banks Cooperate to Identify Organized Crime

The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and seven U.K. banks are working together to identify and take action against organized crime.

In this public-private partnership, the banks are providing the NCA with account data that indicates potential criminality, and investigators from both the NCA and the banks are analyzing that data, along with the NCA’s crime-related data, the agency said in a Friday (July 26) press release.

“At the moment, criminals can exploit the banking system to move money at pace across international borders in ways that law enforcement has struggled to prevent,” Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre in the NCA, said in the release.

“This joint working is a truly innovative approach to try and prevent this criminality,” Searle added. “It is the first time this has been tried on such a scale anywhere in the world.”

Bringing together data from the participating banks and from NCA should help identify criminality that was otherwise unknown and reduce the risk banks are managing, according to the release.

The project went live in May and has supported NCA’s operations against organized immigration crime, fraud and money laundering, the release said.

Eight organized crime networks have been identified, and the participating banks are gaining a better understanding of how to guard against such networks, per the release.

“The NCA and its banking partners have designed the data sharing principles to ensure that only account data with multiple clear indicators of economic crime is included,” Searle said in the release. “The data provided by banking sector partners only includes information on customers (people or businesses) that meet a set of markers which are indicative of potential criminal behavior.”

In another cooperative effort in the U.K., the banking and finance industry trade association UK Finance said in May that financial services industry initiatives helped drive down fraud losses in the country in 2023.

UK Finance said one of the main contributors to the drop in unauthorized fraud losses is the rollout of Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) over the past two years. By verifying customers’ identity, SCA has helped to reduce remote purchase losses involving payment cards.