Provision of Financial Data Analytic Platform under the Hong Kong Police Force
Implementation of the financial data analytic platform
Mr CHAN Chun-ying said that he supported the proposal. He noted that owing to the limited capabilities of STREAMS currently used by JFIU for receiving, processing and disseminating STRs, it took time for JFIU to determine the proper way to deal with each and every STR and could take up to six weeks for JFIU to come up with an informed decision for considering further handling of the relevant property reported in an STR. He asked if any ML/TF cases had been missed out during such long period.
DS(FS)1 said that the functions of STREAMS were confined to data maintenance and simple data checking. At present JFIU officers had to manually review and further analyze each STR generated from STREAMS to determine the follow-up action for each and every case. Acting ACP (Crime) supplemented that currently, after filing an STR, the reporting entity had to stop dealing with the relevant property until receiving advice from JFIU on how to handle the property. With the proposed FDAP, it was expected that the feedback on the handling of property involved in STRs could be provided to reporting entities within one week.
Costs for developing the financial data analytic platform
Mr CHAN Chun-ying enquired about the systems that would interface with the proposed FDAP and if additional costs would be required for upgrading such systems. Referring to the much higher costs on site preparation and rental of the Government Cloud in developing the Traffic e-Enforcement System (“TES”), he asked about the reasons for the low estimated non-recurrent expenditure of HK$112,000 for site preparation and HK$5.6 million for rental of the Government Cloud in developing FDAP.
DS(FS)1 and Acting ACP (Crime) explained that the proposed FDAP would establish interface with HKPF’s other internal systems and other databases/systems of various government departments. For instance, JFIU would explore the feasibility of establishing interface with databases/systems of other LEAs, such as the Customs and Excise Department and the Immigration Department. Regarding the estimated non-recurrent expenditure, CSM (ITB) explained that the proposed FDAP was a back-end system developed mainly to store and analyze data. TES, on the other hand, included application running on mobile devices, and offence details, photographs and/or videos would need to be captured and uploaded to TES. More equipment would need to be installed onsite and larger storage capacity would also be required, thus involving higher recurrent costs in site preparation and cloud services.