DBS Leverages Big Data Analytics to Reduce Trade Anomalies

Sept. 1 — DBS Bank, which is shaping the future of banking, continues to blaze a path in the industry, including in the traditionally paper-based trade finance business.

The bank said today that working in partnership with A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore’s largest ICT research institute, and Cloudera, the leading provider of a data management and analytics platform built on the Apache Hadoop ecosystem, it has established a groundbreaking programme that will enable it to leverage big data technology to detect abnormal transaction activities in the trade finance space. Such a programme is a first for a Singapore bank.

Choong Yang Ping, Managing Director, Technology and Operations, DBS Bank said, “With global trade set to grow, and increased regulatory demands on anti money-laundering and fraud prevention, we believe in taking a proactive approach in enhancing our current risk management processes. This trade alerts programme has helped the bank create a more robust platform to detect trade anomalies. The bank is now able to use the big data to manage the overall transactional trends more effectively.”

While trade finance is a burgeoning business, it remains a paper-intensive industry involving manual processes. Traditionally, trade finance controls have also centred on the bank’s understanding of its clients, the nature of the transaction, documentary financing and credit monitoring. With this new trade alerts initiative, DBS is able to detect fraud anomalies through transactional trends instead of relying on checks on singular transactions.

The trade alerts programme was launched in April 2016 and these alerts are currently detected at the transaction level; over time, DBS intends to extend this to a customer portfolio view in real time.  The trade alerts capability covers 13 locations across DBS Group. It was made possible with the partnership with Cloudera, using big data infrastructure first deployed 12 months ago.

“We are pleased to partner with DBS, a very forward thinking financial institution in Asia,” said Mike Olson, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Cloudera. “The finance industry is going digital and financial services companies like DBS are harnessing data to make informed decisions, identify trends and to stay ahead of competition. At the same time, financial services businesses face tremendous regulatory pressure from authorities to recognise and prevent fraud, to comply with international law and to reduce risks. Cloudera offers a fully secured and governed enterprise data platform that delivers more flexibility, more cost control and more value for these workloads than legacy systems. It is ideal for the needs and requirements of the financial service business. This is why the world’s leading financial service companies choose to work with Cloudera.”

Ng Peng Khim, Head of Institutional Banking Group Technology, Digital Innovation & Data Management, DBS Bank said, “DBS has invested in technology and people over the past five years and will continue to do so going forward. The use of big data technologies using open source programming and integrated analytics enables us to glean stronger insights for decision-making purposes.”

About Cloudera

Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified Platform for big data, an enterprise data hub built on Apache Hadoop. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, access, process, secure, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data. Cloudera’s open source big data platform is the most widely adopted in the world, and Cloudera is the most prolific contributor to the open source Hadoop ecosystem. As the leading educator of Hadoop professionals, Cloudera has trained over 40,000 individuals worldwide. Over 1,700 partners and a seasoned professional services team help deliver greater time to value. Leading organizations in every industry plus top public sector organizations globally run Cloudera in production.

Source: Cloudera