By AML Intelligence Correspondent
CANADA’S FINTRAC director Sarah Paquet today (Thurs) announced the agency’s new vision for real-time reporting.
Paquet said that if FINTRAC was to be a world-leading FIU fully capable of operating in an ever-changing world, it meant the ability to work in real-time.
“This means harnessing modern skills, tools and technologies to be able to identify, assess and communicate risk in real-time; to support and respond to businesses in real-time; to receive reporting in real-time; to conduct our analysis in real-time; and to generate financial intelligence for law enforcement and national security agencies in real-time or as close to it as we can get,” she said in a speech.
“Take our work in combatting human trafficking for sexual exploitation, for example. Being able to work in real time – particularly as it relates to reporting by businesses and our intelligence analysis – would be nothing short of a game-changer,” she added.
The agency also wants to identify and disrupt networks much quicker. This would mean rescuing victims sooner, saving them from prolonged abuse. It would mean supporting survivors sooner, getting them the assistance they need in a more timely fashion. And it would help law enforcement target, arrest and charge the human traffickers sooner, preventing the abuse of new victims.
“Central to our vision for modernization, we’re shifting more fully towards an enhanced risk-based approach, modernizing and evolving our supervisory framework beyond measuring ‘technical compliance’ to promoting risk awareness, risk identification and effective risk mitigation,” she said.
This evolution within the Supervision sector would see the agency move from regional management to enterprise management, where our end-to-end operations will be delivered through sector-specific streams.
“With this change, we’re tailoring our approaches to better meet the needs of our businesses – in the form of services, support and tools that make it easier for them to identify and mitigate money laundering and terrorist financing risks, and meet legislative requirements,” she said.
“For example, our shift to risk-based supervision means providing businesses with ease of access to FINTRAC in order to upload and share reporting information. We should be able to access a business’s data quality and timeliness and provide immediate feedback if there are anomalies in the rate or quality of reporting,” she added.
The agency was focusing on advancing Centre-wide digital automation, analytics and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). It had created a new digital acceleration and modernization team that will allow us to experiment with, and exploit, the latest technologies.
With a focus on modernization, FINTRAC was looking to leap ahead from a technical, process and culture perspective so that we can stay ahead of the bad actors, find new and meaningful ways to collaborate with our partners and continue to deliver value and results in an ever-changing world.
“Our vision is aspirational and will require legislative and regulatory change as well as investment by FINTRAC and businesses in available and advancing technologies. But it has to be the future of our anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing efforts if we want to be able to protect Canada and Canadians in the years and decades to come. As I said earlier, status quo is not an option – we will become irrelevant in the face of emerging technologies,” the agency director said.
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