Rabobank and ABN Amro target privacy-friendly data analysis

ABN Amro and Rabobank are working with research outfit TNO to test technology that lets banks share data used for detecting financial crime while still respecting clients’ privacy.

The partners are experimenting with ways of monitoring transactions between clients at different banks without sharing the risk scores that they assign their customers.

“We don’t want to share these risk scores with other banks. But if one of our low-risk clients receives money from high-risk clients at other banks, we want to be able to monitor that client more closely,” explains ABN Amro in a blog.

The Multi Party Computation for Anti Money Laundering (MPC4AML) project is testing whether this problem can be solved by encrypting and splitting the data so that while the original risk score cannot be seen, an algorithm can calculate which low-risk clients are involved in transactions with high-risk clients at other banks, and vice versa.

The partners have been using a synthetic data set containing fictional clients, with “good initial results”.