The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has told Parliament that its COSMIC information-sharing platform is helping banks detect and disrupt illicit fund flows, and that a planned expansion to additional banks and risk areas is scheduled for completion within two years. The reply was given for the Parliament sitting on 5 August 2026.
Alvin Tan, Minister of State and a board member of MAS, replied on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, who chairs MAS, to a question from Member of Parliament He Ting Ru of Sengkang GRC on the platform's effectiveness and its expansion timeline.
What COSMIC does
MAS launched the Collaborative Sharing of ML/TF Information and Cases (COSMIC) on 1 April 2024 so that banks could exchange intelligence on customers throwing up money-laundering or terrorism-financing warning signs. The first phase drew in six of Singapore's major commercial banks and homed in on three priority crime risks: the misuse of legal persons, the misuse of trade finance for illicit purposes, and proliferation financing.
On the platform's impact, the reply said: "Arising from information shared on the platform, COSMIC participant banks filed additional suspicious transaction reports. Further, following participant banks' review and investigations, a significant number of suspicious customer accounts were closed." MAS added that the platform's effectiveness "was affirmed in the recent Mutual Evaluation assessment of Singapore by the Financial Action Task Force."
MAS said it is now stretching COSMIC past those three risk areas and bringing more major banks on board, while pledging to pace the rollout so the gains from sharing do not come at the cost of wholesale de-risking or customer confidentiality.
Why it matters: COSMIC is one of the more advanced state-backed bank information-sharing schemes, and its measured expansion signals how supervisors are trying to scale collective financial-crime detection without pushing banks toward blanket account closures.
