Apparently, everything that has the word Blockchain attached to it is now news-worthy. Or at least that’s how I think this relatively small R&D collaboration between AUSTRAC and Swinburne University of Technology got a mention a couple of days ago in ZDNet, a pretty respectable technology site that has been around forever.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/austrac-trialling-blockchain-to-automate-funds-transfer-instructions/
Coding the International Fund Transfer Instructions (IFTIs) reporting obligations in the AML/CTF Act to enable automated and consistent reporting of IFTIs by Reporting Entities (banks, remitters, casinos, etc) is of course just the first step. It doesn’t require much in terms of sophisticated technologies, but the exercise did expose many different corner cases of international transactions that don’t have ready interpretations in the AML/CTF Act and Regulation that now need to be worked through. What we can achieve here is just much better consistency in the way the thousands of Reporting Entities interpret their IFTI reporting obligations and how they send data to AUSTRAC.
The longer-term goal is to tackle the Suspicious Matter Reporting regime, in particular embedding Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence technologies, including statistical profiling and automated logical reasoning algorithms, into Smart Contracts to build resilience in the front line of the financial system. That would be news-worthy when we eventually get there.
Mental Models 4 Life 