Financial Crime Prevention Initiative Launched in Sweden
June 1, 2020
In a major effort to combat financial crime, the Swedish police authority and five of the country’s largest banks have launched the Swedish Anti Money Laundering Initiative (SAMLIT).
Improving Society’s Ability to Prevent Organized Crime
The initiative aims to improve society’s ability to prevent organized crime by sharing information on suspicious transaction patterns and new types of economic crime. The pilot project will run from June to November 2020, with the goal of being fully implemented in 2021.
Enhanced Collaboration between Authorities and Banks
“We now take the next step to make society better at fighting and preventing organized crime,” said Martin Johansson, senior advisor at SEB and leader of the bank’s work on SAMLIT. “For us, this means that we will get better insights into suspicious transaction patterns in our continued work against money laundering, terrorism financing, and other types of economic crime.”
The initiative will allow the Financial Police and the five banks - Danske Bank, Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB, and Swedbank - to collectively share information on methods, suspicious transaction patterns, and new types of crime that have been jointly identified.
Benefits of Enhanced Collaboration
“We hope that the experience gathered in the pilot project will lead to even better possibilities to share information about suspicious activities between banks,” said Johanna Norberg, country manager at Danske Bank Sweden.
The Money Laundering Act empowers the police authority to request information from banks bilaterally, but within the framework of SAMLIT, the Financial Police and the five banks will have the opportunity to collectively share information on a broader scale.
Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing
“The intelligence service of the police knows the picture of organized crime and of the people making money from criminal activity, while the banks see financial flows and patterns,” said Linda H Staaf, head of the intelligence unit at the police’s National Operations Department (NOA). “By sharing more information with each other, we believe that crimes will be detected at an earlier stage but also that we will be able to prevent them from ever being committed. That’s how we want to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism and combat organized crime.”
International Cooperation
The collaboration is part of Danske Bank’s ongoing cooperation with supervisory authorities and other banks across the Nordics and in Europe.
- In Denmark, the bank has collaborated with Finance Denmark on recommendations for combating financial crime.
- In the Nordics, it is developing a platform for handling and administering KYC data with five major banks.
- Additionally, Danske Bank is represented in a European AML taskforce led by the independent think tank Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) to develop recommendations for an improved EU regulatory framework on anti-money laundering.