Financial experts in Sri Lanka have raised serious concerns following reports of a massive financial fraud amounting to approximately Rs. 13,200 million linked to NDB Bank. The alleged irregularity has sparked intense debate over how such a large-scale transaction flow could have gone undetected by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which is tasked with monitoring suspicious financial activity across the banking sector.
According to financial sector analysts, the FIU operates using a highly advanced transaction monitoring platform known as “goAML,” supported by international institutions and designed to detect unusual patterns in real time. The system is capable of identifying customer behavior, transaction frequency, time patterns, and repeated anomalies, automatically generating Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) and red flags for escalation to senior Central Bank officials. Even relatively small transactions in the range of hundreds of thousands of rupees typically attract scrutiny from banking compliance systems due to strict regulatory thresholds.
However, reports suggest that the alleged fraud involved repeated withdrawals conducted through the CEFTS payment system in structured increments of around Rs. 5 million per transaction. Over a period of months, this is believed to have amounted to at least 2,640 separate transactions, cumulatively reaching the Rs. 13.2 billion figure. Experts argue that such a consistent and repetitive pattern should have triggered multiple alerts within the FIU’s monitoring framework, raising questions about how the activity bypassed automated detection mechanisms.
The apparent failure has led to broader criticism of regulatory oversight and internal controls, with financial experts demanding clarity on whether the lapse was due to systemic failure, negligence, or more serious wrongdoing. They are calling for an immediate, independent, and transparent investigation into the incident to determine how such a large-scale financial anomaly went undetected and to restore public confidence in Sri Lanka’s banking supervision and anti-money laundering framework.
