By Edward Dankwah, GNA
Accra, Dec 10, GNA – Dr Ebenezer Ashley, an Executive of the Ghana Association of Banks, has encouraged Global bodies to keep the pace of higher compliance standards, to reduce the extent to which criminals perceive and rely on trade-based money laundering to transfer illicit funds into the legitimate financial system.
Dr Ashley, who is the Executive Head of Research, said maintenance of complete, consistent and accurate information between actors in the finance world and those in the physical trade-based world was needed to effectively advance the combat of trade-based money laundering.
“Bank of International Settlement, Bankers’ Association for Finance and Trade, increasing number of national regulatory bodies and Financial Action Task Force are noted for their vast contribution to the higher compliance standards in trade finance in recent years, hence the need to keep the pace,” he added.
The Executive Head said transparency in the supply chain was vital to adequately inform participating businesses of happenings at various stages of trade, that is, from final production through delivery.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency on Trade Finance and Trade-Based Money Laundering, Dr Ashley said, organisations could effectively rely on communicated supply chain information to make internal and external business decisions.
He said the socio-economic benefits of supply chain transparency to firms were manifold, such that it had the potential to assure significant improvements in overall resilience through efficiency in the management of disruption risks, third-party risk and concentration risks.
Dr Ashley said the risk mitigation efforts of trade-finance sector organisations would be improved considerably if novel technologies were automated to facilitate the process of identification, assessment and prevention of risks inherent in supply chains.
He said according to “Napier 2023” International trade was touted as the global sector with the most complicated regulations.
“This notwithstanding, activities in the sector thrive on a range of overlapping multilateral and bilateral agreements and prevailing international standards from bodies such as the International Chamber of Commerce”
“International Civil Aviation Organisation, World Customs Organisation and World Trade Organisation,” he added.
Dr Ashley said these global bodies needed to ensure the world consistently observed sharp surge in export-import controls on dual use goods, selected chemicals and precursors and protected wildlife.
He said, however, there was the need for more sanctions and increasing embargoes on unilateral and multilateral trades that were not transacted and concluded in tandem with international best practices and standards.
The Executive Head said developed software for machine learning and artificial intelligence should be used to identify suspicious activities in the international trade space and suspicious transaction behaviours within the global financial sector.
He added that the machine learning models could be tailored to train on relevant threat typologies and related trade patterns to allow the system to generate more automatic alerts and accurate red flags, when inconsistencies were experienced.
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence technology could be relied on by the trade-finance sector actors to reduce information asymmetry challenges and improve evaluation and legitimacy of proposed trade sanctions,” he stressed.
GNA