Application of Technological Solutions in the Fight against Money Laundering—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

With the growing interest in technological solutions aimed at combating money laundering, several studies involving the application of technology have been carried out. However, there were no records of studies aimed at identifying, selecting, rigorously analyzing and synthesizing the literature on solutions that adopt technology to combat money laundering. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on the application of technological solutions in the fight against money laundering. Seventy-one papers were selected from the 795 studies initially retrieved for data extraction, analysis and synthesis based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The results obtained with the data analysis made it possible to identify a general categorization of the domains of application of the approaches, as well as a mapping and classification of the support mechanisms adopted. The findings of this review showed that, among the application domain categories identified, the detection of suspicious transactions attracted greater attention from researchers. Regarding the support mechanisms adopted, the application of data mining techniques was used more extensively to detect money laundering. Topics for further research and refinement were also identified, such as the need for a better description of data analysis to provide more convincing evidence to support the benefits presented.