Seventeen partners from across Europe have joined forces and launched TRACE, a Horizon 2020 project (funded by the European Union) to support the investigation of illicit money flows through the co-development of cutting-edge AI technology tools.
Their solutions will enable Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to detect and combat money-laundering operations and financing of organised crime and terrorism by increasing the efficiency of information sharing. Our Finopz – KYC Portal team is proud to be one of the partners of this project.
Within a three-year life span, the TRACE project will provide LEAs and other relevant stakeholders with solutions to better identify and disrupt illicit money trails. As organised crime networks operate across borders, use legal loopholes and advanced technology, it is notoriously difficult to detect, and trace hidden and illicit money flows. The TRACE Consortium will co‐create innovative data management solutions combined with AI analytics to enhance the capabilities of law enforcement agencies in tracing and recovering illicit money flows and generating court‐proof e‐evidence.
Every year, cross border investigation into illicit money flows are hindered by fragmented e-Evidence. To address this issue, the TRACE project will deliver a modular open-source framework for money-laundering investigations which can be tailored to meet the needs of LEAs. This framework will enable investigators to scrape lawfully available data in any given language, analyse it and then visualise the results.
In order to provide a technical solution that will be beneficial to LEAs, TRACE utilises a bottom-up approach. Understanding the needs and experiences of investigators familiar with the various use cases researched by the project will serve as the foundation of framework development.
TRACE will focus on the following key aspects:
- Co-develop and validate innovative technologies to detect and analyse cross-border money flows used by criminals and terrorists.
- Increase efficiency and effectiveness of information sharing among European LEAs to better respond to cross-border financial crimes.
- Design and test innovative training materials for LEAs across Europe.
- Maintain European societal values and fundamental rights by adopting a co-creative and ethics-by-design approach in technology development.
All of the partners in this European project are bringing various expertise to the table. From advanced AI expertise to research, analytics, anti-fraud expertise and much more. The KYC Portal team will be contributing mostly in creating the taxonomies around the data sets being studied in this project. Based on our market experience and KYC Portal, that is already being used in various industries such as finance, gaming, crypto and many more. The aim of such taxonomies helps in better categorising the various elements of such illicit activity however the main aim is that of creating a means to forecast such behaviour.
