Using Open Banking and Data Technologies to prevent money-laundering in the UK property market

英国房地产正日益成为世界犯罪分子的“洗钱”选择_（BBC-Panorama-'Following-the-drug-money'-2019）_。透明国际指出，用洗钱资金购买的44亿英镑英国房产，它说这是“冰山一角”。房产为欺诈者提供了一个安全港，可以在一笔交易中将大量“肮脏的钱”融入法律的经济，助长了整个英国和国际上的犯罪。因此，监管机构加大了对房地产专业人士（律师/房地产经纪人/抵押贷款经纪人/抵押贷款人）的监督和压力，导致房地产交易时间变慢，专业人士和房主的体验变差。防止房地产洗钱的守门人是房地产律师。洗钱条例要求他们通过完成详细和昂贵的检查来打击洗钱，以确认家庭主妇的身份和财富/资金来源，这些检查是手工进行的，速度慢（20天），费用高（150英镑），效果不佳。律师花费150英镑的时间收集身份证件，银行对账单和支持证据，然后评估他们是否使用非洗钱的购买资金。由于没有技术解决方案，财产律师别无选择，只能使用更多的人工程序来防止洗钱。这些程序在制止洗钱方面是无效的，因为伪造任何文件都很容易，未经训练的眼睛很难发现。令房主沮丧的是，手工收集的信息不能安全地与其他需要它的人共享，比如房地产经纪人、抵押贷款经纪人和抵押贷款人，这意味着他们必须多次从头开始评估自己的财务状况。在一位朋友在购买房产时被骗走2.5万英镑，并多次经历痛苦的反洗钱（AML）检查后，联合创始人杰克和奥利成立了Thirdfort，以简化英国房产的身份和AML检查。Thirdfort已经开发了一个移动应用程序，可以使用电子验证自动进行身份检查，现在将自动进行这些痛苦的手动洗钱检查。使用开放银行技术，Thirdfort将能够即时访问和分析银行对账单数据。然后生成一份报告，供房地产律师评估并与房地产代理/抵押贷款经纪人/抵押贷款人分享。Thirdfort将减轻房地产专业人士收集文件的手工负担，并提供更好，更准确的方法来识别非法资金。这些检查可以在不需要纸张的情况下完成，使房主能够通过电话进行检查，加快财产交易时间，减少法律的费用。这使律师能够提供更好的服务，并为防止英国财产洗钱提供了一个强大的工具。

UK property is increasingly becoming the 'money-laundry' of choice for the world's criminals _(BBC-Panorama-'Following-the-drug-money'-2019)_. Transparency International pinpointed £4.4billion of UK properties bought with laundered funds, a sum it said was "the tip of the iceberg"_(Financial-Times-2019)_.Property provides a safe harbour for fraudsters to integrate large sums of 'dirty money' into the legal economy in a single transaction, fuelling crime throughout the UK and internationally. Consequently, regulators have ramped up oversight and pressure on property professionals (lawyers/estate-agents/mortgage-brokers/mortgage-lenders) leading to slower property transaction times and worsened experiences for professionals and homemovers.The gatekeepers to prevent money-laundering in property are property-lawyers. Money-laundering regulations require them to combat money-laundering by completing detailed and costly checks to confirm homemovers' identities and sources of wealth/funds.These checks are performed manually, which is slow (20-days), costly (£150) and ineffective. Lawyers spend £150 of time collecting ID-documents, bank statements and supportive evidence from homemovers, then assessing them to establish if they are using non-laundered purchase funds. This is very difficult to do smoothly and accurately.With no technological solution, property-lawyers have no alternative other than to throw more manual processes at preventing money-laundering. These processes are ineffective at stopping money-laundering because falsifying any document is easy to do and hard for the untrained eye to detect. Frustratingly for the homemover, manual information gathering cannot be securely shared with others who need it, such as estate-agents, mortgage-brokers and mortgage-lenders, meaning they must have their financial affairs assessed from scratch multiple times.Thirdfort is changing this. After a friend was defrauded out of £25k during a property purchase and having been through painful anti-money-laundering ("AML") checks multiple times, co-founders Jack and Olly set up Thirdfort to streamline identity and AML-checks in UK property. Thirdfort has built a mobile-app to automate ID-checks using electronic verification and will now automate these painful and manual money-laundering checks. Using Open-Banking technology, Thirdfort will enable instant access and analysis of bank statement data. A report is then generated for the property-lawyer to assess and share with estate-agents/mortgage-brokers/mortgage-lenders.Thirdfort will relieve property-professionals of the manual burden of collecting documents and provide a better, more accurate way to identify illegitimate funds. The checks can be done without the need for paper, empowering homemovers to carry out checks via their phone, speeding up property transaction times and reducing legal fees. This frees up lawyers to give better service and provides a robust tool for preventing UK property money-laundering.