DARPA considering program to ‘revolutionize’ AML

The U.S. Department of Defense is considering launching a program to “revolutionize the practice of anti-money laundering” and cut the flow of funding to threats against the country’s security.

The Information Innovation Office (I2O) within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has declared Anticipatory and Adaptive Anti-Money Laundering (A3ML) to be an area of interest for additional future research.

DARPA says current AML practices are “manual, reactive and expensive,” and can be improved with algorithms and agile methods.

“According to Congressional research, money laundering schemes often evade detection and disruption, as anti-money laundering (AML) efforts today rely on manual analysis of large amounts of data and are limited by finite resources and human cognitive processing speed.”

This approach is not good enough to stop half of the funding for North Korea’s nuclear program from being funded with laundered money, or money launderers connected to underground banks in China from providing financial services to Mexico’s Sinaloa crime cartel, according to the program announcement.

And the AML landscape is only becoming more complex. A recent white paper from J.P. Morgan suggests “repurposable” digital identities could help improve AML effectiveness in tokenized asset markets.

The special notice is not a request for information or solicitation for proposals, DARPA notes, but has been issued to inform the industry and help with its planning.

Article Topics

AML  |  banking  |  behavioral analysis  |  biometrics  |  DARPA  |  Department of Defense  |  U.S. Government