Data and technology can help detect and disrupt criminal activity, FCA executive director of supervision Megan Butler has said in a speech at the anti-money laundering (AML) TechSprint conference.

In her speech, Butler acknowledged that the FCA isn’t aware of all successful AML attempts as criminals do not advertise their success, thus making it “extremely hard” to measure, and results in an intelligence gap. In a bid to combat and close this gap, the FCA launched an annual financial crime data return at the end of 2016 and sent it to several thousand UK-based firms, including all major banks and life insurers.

The FCA found a common theme among its responses, revealing that staff in the UK financial services are playing a frontline role in combating crime, with employees raising more than 920,000 internal suspicious activity reports to their money laundering reporting officers.

The FCA revealed that banks spend approximately £5bn a year combatting crime. However, Butler added that “there’s no expectation on firms to spend money just to ‘show willing’ or as a way of ‘virtue signalling’”, as this sum is £1bn more than the UK spends on prisons and emphasised that the “international priority” is on efficacy and “not overheads”.

“I can only repeat the fact that we are primarily interested in outcomes and that we operate in the real world.”

“So if there are methods, innovations, or technologies that help you combat crime, tell regulators about them – and do not be afraid to move first. Excessive risk aversion is not going to help us win an arms race that is so heavily rooted in automation. We need to turn technology against criminals,” Butler added.

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