Mastercard has officially announced the launch of TRACE (Trace Financial Crime) in Asia Pacific, a sophisticated network-level solution that harnesses AI to identify and prevent money laundering and financial crime. Powered by timely and large-scale payments data from multiple financial institutions, TRACE provides holistic intelligence beyond an individual financial institution’s siloed view, enabling tracing of financial crime across a payments network.
In recent years, Real-Time Payments (RTP) have seen a rapid rise in use among individuals and businesses across Asia Pacific, allowing transactions to be settled between accounts at different financial institutions within seconds – something which in the past often took a matter of days. However, this speed has also made it a target for money launderers and ‘mules’, who try to evade detection by moving funds rapidly between multiple accounts. Oftentimes, criminals also involve the accounts of unwitting civilians through methods such as romance and investment scams.
Financial institutions have largely relied on semi-manual methods or in-house AI solutions to detect these illicit patterns, but these typically rely on their own data and lack the holistic, network-level perspective needed to trace such far-reaching criminal activity. Oftentimes, investigations take weeks to complete. To address this, Mastercard developed TRACE, which uses cutting-edge data science techniques to trace potentially fraudulent transaction patterns across a payments network, as well as providing proactive alerts to banks about suspicious accounts. TRACE incorporates critical data points across an entire domestic network to identify money mules involved in financial crime (such as frauds, scams, etc.), giving financial institutions a network-level perspective they wouldn’t otherwise have.
