CloudMile and Tookitaki sign MoU to strengthen AI-driven financial crime prevention in Malaysia

• Partnership combines secure cloud infrastructure with AI-driven financial crime detection capabilities
• Collaboration aims to help Malaysian financial institutions strengthen fraud detection and regulatory compliance

CloudMile, an established AI and cloud service provider in Asia, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tookitaki, a global pioneer in anti-money laundering (AML) and transaction fraud prevention, to jointly advance secure, AI-driven financial crime prevention capabilities for Malaysia’s financial services industry.

The agreement marks a shared commitment to support Malaysian financial institutions in defending against increasingly sophisticated financial crime in real time by combining Tookitaki’s AI-driven detection technology with CloudMile’s expertise in secure cloud architecture, AI-ready deployment and implementation for regulated industries.

As fraud accelerates, legacy defenses struggle to keep pace

With the rapid adoption of digital banking and instant payment rails such as DuitNow, financial fraud in Malaysia now moves in milliseconds. Mule accounts and complex fraud networks have become one of the most pressing challenges facing Malaysian banks, with illicit funds passing through layers of accounts before traditional systems can respond effectively.

At the same time, Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) continues to raise regulatory expectations through updated anti-money laundering and financial crime frameworks. Traditional rule-based legacy systems, which flag thousands of false alerts, can no longer keep pace. Financial institutions need real-time, AI-driven and secure technology that detects multi-channel fraud before losses occur.

An integrated collaboration built on complementary strengths

CloudMile and Tookitaki are combining their strengths into a single, unified AI-driven financial crime prevention ecosystem.

CloudMile plays a key role in designing and implementing the secure cloud architecture that enables Tookitaki’s AI-driven financial crime detection capabilities to be deployed for regulated financial institutions. By combining its cloud infrastructure expertise with AI-ready deployment architecture, CloudMile helps Malaysian financial institutions modernise fraud detection with the scalability, reliability and security required to support real-time financial crime prevention.

Tookitaki provides the detection engine through its flagship platform FinCense. Powered by Collaborative Intelligence, Tookitaki’s Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) Ecosystem enables compliance experts worldwide to share emerging financial crime typologies, so banks can deploy defences against new fraud patterns in hours rather than months.

According to Tookitaki’s internal data and customer case studies, FinCense’s Explainable AI has delivered a 50% reduction in false alerts and a 45% improvement in fraud detection cost efficiency for financial institutions.

Through the collaboration, CloudMile and Tookitaki aim to support Malaysian financial institutions in evaluating AI-driven approaches to financial crime prevention, with a focus on improving the identification of mule account networks, enhancing alert investigation efficiency and strengthening responsiveness to emerging fraud typologies.

A shared commitment to Malaysia’ s financial crime prevention ecosystem

Under the MoU, both parties will collaborate on joint solution development, go-to-market initiatives and knowledge sharing for Malaysia’s financial services sector, with a focus on helping local institutions strengthen financial crime defences while meeting regulatory requirements on security, resilience and operational governance.

“As Malaysia’s financial services sector accelerates digital transformation, financial institutions need more than standalone fraud detection tools. They need a secure, scalable and AI-ready cloud architecture that can support real-time financial crime prevention while meeting the reliability and security expectations of the banking industry,” Lester Leong, country manager, CloudMile said.

“CloudMile and Tookitaki have forged a strategic alliance combining local deployment accountability, specialised AML application capability and secure cloud-native infrastructure to revolutionise financial crime compliance for high-growth digital ecosystems. This unified partnership is essential to deliver a complete, regulator-ready AML platform, seamlessly bridging Tookitaki’s proven FinCense detection engine and AWS’s resilient cloud foundation with CloudMile’s on-the-ground AI CCOE capabilities, systems integration and local managed operations,” he added.

“Financial crime is a network problem. Criminals move across institutions, and no single organisation can fight it alone. That’s why intelligence has to be collective, and controls have to be deployable. Our partnership with CloudMile solves exactly that: Tookitaki brings the ecosystem intelligence and detection capabilities, while CloudMile brings the secure cloud infrastructure to deploy them. Together, Malaysian financial institutions gain a smarter control environment – one that can adapt as threats evolve, not just react after the fact,” Abhishek Chatterjee, founder and CEO, Tookitaki, said.

Exclusive executive briefing for FSI leaders

To mark the partnership, CloudMile and Tookitaki will co-host an invite-only executive briefing in Kuala Lumpur for C-suite leaders across Malaysia’s financial services industry. The briefing will explore how financial institutions can move from rule-based alert handling to real-time, AI-driven detection, covering regulatory expectations, secure cloud and AI deployment architecture, and approaches to reduce false alerts while strengthening long-term financial crime prevention resilience.