Thunder Bay – World News – Singapore is making its financial crime-fighting tool bigger. The tool, called COSMIC, lets banks share tips about shady customers across company lines. Regulators now want more banks — and maybe other money businesses — to join in, as crooks get sneakier.
Quick Take
- COSMIC is Singapore’s platform that lets banks swap red-flag info on risky customers.
- It launched April 1, 2024, with six big banks: DBS, OCBC, UOB, Citibank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered.
- In its first year, it helped flag 461 extra suspicious reports tied to over SGD 1.6 billion (about $1.2 billion USD) in transactions.
- Singapore’s government wants to add more banks and possibly non-bank financial firms to the platform.
- Experts say the tool only works as well as each bank’s own screening systems.
What COSMIC Actually Does
COSMIC stands for Collaborative Sharing of ML/TF Information & Cases. ML/TF means money laundering and terrorism financing — basically, dirty money moving through the system.
The problem COSMIC solves is simple. A company might look fine to one bank, but if it’s quietly banking with five others too, nobody sees the full picture. COSMIC connects those dots.
Banks on the platform can ask each other for info, share tips on their own, or post details about a customer after they file a report and cut ties with that customer. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) runs the show, under rules set in 2023.
COSMIC focuses on three danger zones: companies being used as fake fronts, trade finance scams, and financing tied to weapons proliferation.
Strict Rules Keep Sharing in Check
This isn’t a free-for-all. Banks can only share info for fighting money laundering, terrorism financing, or weapons financing — never for marketing or deciding who gets a loan.
MAS laid out detailed rulebooks in late 2024. These cover how banks must handle the shared data, who gets access, and how to keep records.
Breaking these rules has teeth. Lying or being careless with disclosures can mean fines and even jail time. Other violations can cost banks up to SGD 1 million (around $740,000 USD).
The First-Year Numbers Look Promising
COSMIC’s early results back up the idea that teamwork catches more bad guys. In just 12 months, it helped surface 461 new suspicious transaction reports.
Those reports covered transactions worth more than SGD 1.6 billion. Banks also shut down 1,152 sketchy accounts and caught two criminal networks that no single bank had spotted on its own.
That’s real money and real criminals caught — not just paperwork.
Singapore Wants to Go Bigger
A government review published in May 2026 praised COSMIC and pushed for expansion. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs confirmed more banks will join, and some non-bank financial companies might get added too.
More players means more eyes on shady money. But it also means more data to manage and more systems that need to talk to each other smoothly.
A wider net could help banks spot criminal patterns stretching across more companies and accounts — but only if the data behind it is solid.
Why Good Bank Tech Still Matters
RegTech firm ZIGRAM — a company that builds compliance software — says COSMIC is only as strong as the banks feeding it. RegTech just means “regulation technology,” tools that help companies follow financial rules.
If a bank’s own screening and monitoring tools are weak, it either misses real criminals or drowns everyone in false alarms. ZIGRAM points to tools like customer screening, transaction monitoring, and ownership tracing as the building blocks that make shared tips actually useful.
Getting the alert thresholds right is tricky too. Too loose, and compliance teams get buried in junk alerts. Too tight, and real crime slips through.
What’s Next
COSMIC doesn’t replace the work banks already must do to vet customers — it adds to it. As Singapore adds more banks and financial firms to the platform, the real test will be whether shared data leads to action, not just more alerts piling up on someone’s desk.
