Netherlands-Singapore collaboration to combat high-tech financial crime

The Netherlands’ CFLW Cyber Strategies BV (CFLW) and Singapore’s TAU Express (TAU) have signed a partnership agreement to develop new technologies for combating high-tech financial crime.

This collaboration combines CFLW’s strengths in OSINT solutions such as Dark Web monitoring with TAU’s AI-enabled Intelligence Analytics capabilities.

CFLW and TAU Express will work on Project BIANCO, an acronym for Breaking Illicit Virtual Asset Networks with Crypto analytics Open sources. This project aims to tackle financial crimes involving cryptocurrencies or other virtual assets.

According to both companies, financial institutions and other virtual asset service providers (VASPs) face a myriad of evolving threats from cybercriminals and advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.

“These threat actors mount sophisticated attacks, steal corporate information, and sell data obtained via illicit means on the dark web. The tracking and identification of these threat actors is an extremely challenging task due to the borderless and somewhat pseudo-anonymous nature of cyberspace,” CFLW and TAU Express said in a press release.

Enhancing cyber intelligence analytics

The CFLW-TAU partnership will develop new technologies to promote trusted transactions in the digital economy by augmenting existing tools for customer due diligence and transaction monitoring processes, enhancing capabilities in cyber intelligence analytics, as well as supplementing blockchain analytics solutions already available in the market. The project is co-funded by the GlobalStars programme of the EUREKA Network.

“The Netherlands and Singapore are both small, open economies. By bringing together our technologies, we co-create a value proposition that combines technological innovation with a relentless pursuit of rigorous solutions.” says Dr Mark van Staalduinen, Managing Director of CFLW.

“Our partnership addresses the existing market need for actionable intelligence by employing smart algorithms to deliver insights and operational perspectives. This partnership also creates opportunities for both companies in foreign markets. For TAU, this is an opportunity to tap into the European market, and vice versa for CFLW in relation to Southeast Asia.” says Prof. Lam Kwok Yan, co-founder of TAU, an R&D spin-off from Nanyang Technological University Singapore.