SINGAPORE - Singapore's central bank said on Friday it would introduce a digital platform enabling banks to share information on customers and transactions, part of efforts to prevent money laundering and financing of criminal activity.

The central bank plans to launch the platform in the first half of 2023.

It is a cooperation between the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and six major commercial banks in the city-state - DBS Group, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp, United Overseas Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank and HSBC, the MAS said.

"The information-sharing framework is designed to target serious criminal behaviours and allow financial institutions to more quickly detect the bad actors to purge and deter them," Loo Siew Yee, MAS's assistant managing director for policy payments and financial crime, said in a statement.

The MAS said a common challenge faced by financial institutions was that they were not able to warn each other about unusual activity in customers' accounts. "This gap is frequently exploited by financial criminals," it said.

  - Reuters