FCA advises banks to use new technologies to tackle cybercrime

UK financial regulatory body UK Finance has urged banks to use new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to fight cybercrime.

Discussing the issue in a speech at the FCA’s Cross-Border Anti-Money Laundering TechSprint, the regulatory body’s executive director of supervision - investment, wholesale and specialist, Megan Butler, stated that technology is crucial to the protection of institutions when it comes to financial crime.

Priority

According to Butler, half of the crimes recorded in the UK are cybercrimes. Tackling finance-related cybercrime is now a priority for the FCA and the UK government as they look to boost protection of firms in the finance sector as the UK’s exit from the EU approaches.

The City of London Corporation is among those that are tackling cybercrime, with the governing body planning a new economic and cybercrime court in London’s Square Mile.

Butler has now suggested that firms not spend more money on tackling cybercrime by manually reviewing high-risk transactions, advising them to inform regulators of methods, innovations or technologies that help to fight crime and not to be afraid to move first with these new technologies.

Intelligent

Butler believes that technology should be used against criminals and that to do this, the next step “is to apply intelligent technologies — like AI, robotics, natural language processing and machine learning — so that firms can spot suspicious transactions in real time from unstructured account and transaction data”.

Despite the FCA advising firms to use new technologies to fight financial cybercrime, Butler warned that they would not be let off if things went wrong, but she added that this technology could reduce firms’ risk exposure if they implemented it in a way that they would implement any other technology.