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Financial crime in Singapore has escalated to unprecedented levels, with scams costing more than S$3.4 billion since 2019, according to the Straits Times.
To help organizations tackle this challenge, Salesforce’s Agentforce offers AI-driven capabilities to automate customer anti-money laundering and combating the financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations, enhance client risk profiling, and streamline regulatory filings, according a joint paper by Salesforce and PwC.
The paper explores the changing financial crime landscape in Singapore and looks at Saleforce’s Agentforce solution, showing how the platform can help Singaporean banks combat financial crime threats.
Agentforce is Salesforce’s enterprise grade AI agent platform that enables companies build, test, deploy, manage, and orchestrate AI agents. It covers the full lifecycle of AI agents, offering low‑code and pro‑code tools for developers and business users to create digital labor that can act on behalf of customers, suppliers, and employees 24/7.
The primary purpose of Agentforce is to automate repetitive, knowledge‑intensive tasks across organizations. In sales, AI agents can generate and update quotes, surface relevant deal information, and coach representatives in real time, helping teams close deals faster, and improving overall performance. In customer service contexts, agents can resolve routine inquiries, pull data from CRM records, and hand off complex issues to human operators. This enables faster response times, minimizing errors, and scaling support capacity.
In fraud detection and compliance, Agentforce integrates seamlessly with MuleSoft Agent Fabric. MuleSoft Agent Fabric is a governance and orchestration layer that connects multiple AI agents into a single coordinated ecosystem, acting as the “central nervous system”. This integration delivers coordinated fraud detection, with agents sharing insights and triggering joint investigations, reducing time‑to‑detect.
MuleSoft Agent Fabric also offers strong governance and auditability across all AI agents in the financial crime ecosystem, enforcing security, privacy, and regulatory controls. This helps banks confidently deploy AI at scale, knowing that every autonomous decision is safe, compliant, and auditable.
Another key feature of MuleSoft Agent Fabric is its Agent Visualizer, which automatically records every agent-to-agent interaction and decision, creating a comprehensive trail. This means banks can easily demonstrate to regulators how decisions were made, which agents were involved, and what data was accessed.
Key use cases
The Salesforce and PwC paper highlights three main ways Agentforce can strengthen fraud detection and compliance.
First, Agentforce can be used to streamline traditionally manual and time-consuming know-your-customer (KYC) and customer due diligence (CDD) processes. By leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it automates ingestion and validation of client documents, detect expiration, ensure completeness, and apply onboarding checklists. This can result in benefits including reduced onboarding time and friction, improved accuracy and consistency across jurisdictions, and enhanced operational efficiency for middle-office managed service environments.
Second, Agentforce can be used in risk scoring automation by aggregating and analyzing internal and external data sources using configurable rules and AI-driven insights. It can dynamically adjust due diligence levels based on evolving risk indicators, such as transaction patterns, geography, and adverse media, and trigger escalations when thresholds are breached. This allows for real-time risk assessment, a reduction in manual efforts and false positives, and optimized resource allocation for compliance teams.
Finally, in regulatory compliance management, Agentforce can automate the preparation, validation, and submission of mandatory regulatory filings. It can be used to extract key data points, validate against regulatory requirements, and generate submission-ready documentation with full audit trails. This automation can cut manual data analysis by up to 30%, reduce risk of errors and missed deadlines, and strengthen confidence in meeting local and global compliance standards, the paper says.
Financial crime on the rise
Financial crime in Singapore has risen dramatically over the past years. In H1 2025, close to S$500 million was lost to scams in the city state, with almost 20,000 cases reported in Singapore, according to the Straits Times. Government official impersonation scams, in particular, remained a key concern during that period, with the number of cases almost tripling from 589 in H1 2024 to 1,762 in H1 2025.
The trend continued into 2026, with at least S$2.9 million lost in February alone to a scam variant in which victims were duped into handing over valuables such as gold bars, jewelry and luxury watches to imposters posing as government officials.
These trends coincide with rapid digital transformation. Singapore’s digital economy now contributes S$128.1 billion in value-added output, representing 18.6% of GDP in 2024, up from 18% in 2023 and 14.9% in 2019, according to official data. Between 2019 to 2024, the digital economy grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12%, significantly faster than that of the nominal GDP growth rate of 7.3%.
Among businesses, digital adoption is near-universal. In 2024, 97% of SMEs had adopted at least one sector-specific digital solution, up from 85% in 2023.
AI is further amplifying these risks, with deepfakes posing a rising threat to the business community. In March 2025, a finance director at a multinational firm in Singapore authorized a US$499,000 payment after a Zoom call that featured an AI-generated deepfake of the company’s senior leadership. The deepfake convincingly replicated the facial movements and voices of the actual executives, effectively duping the director.
Survey data indicate that 56% of Singaporean businesses have encountered audio deepfake fraud and 52% have experienced video deepfakes.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by Musfikur Rahman Muin via Freepik
