Banking co-operative Swift is rolling out an AI-powered anomaly detection service to help banks proactively detect and defend against potential financial crime.

Available from January 2025, the new service follows a successful pilot with financial institutions across Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East, Finextra.com reports.

The new capability builds on Swift’s existing Payment Controls Service - used by many small and medium-sized financial institutions - by drawing on pseudonymised data from the billions of transactions that flow over the messaging network each year to identify and flag suspicious transactions so that action can be taken in real-time.

Jerome Piens, chief product officer at Swift, says: “Bad actors are using increasingly sophisticated tactics to commit financial crime, and the global financial industry needs to raise its defences higher to ensure their customers can continue to transact globally with confidence.”

Since February, Swift has been working with member banks to explore how federated learning, combined with privacy-enhancing technologies, could enable market participants to share information without revealing their proprietary data. The group has so far developed a number of fraud detection use cases which are set to be tested in a sandbox environment.

Olivier Nautet, head of cybersecurity, BNP Paribas, says of the initiative: "Collaboration across the banking sector is crucial to enhancing fraud detection, and by sharing data and leveraging AI, we empower ourselves to stay ahead. At BNP Paribas, we are fully committed to supporting Swift’s innovative initiative in that regard, as it marks a key step forward in protecting the integrity of our financial ecosystem."actively detect and defend against potential financial crime.

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