Financial Intelligence Unit

Financial intelligence (FININT) is the gathering of information about the financial affairs of entities of interest, to understand their nature and capabilities, and predict their intentions. Generally the term applies in the context of law enforcement and related activities.

One of the main purposes of financial intelligence is to identify financial transactions that may involve tax evasion, money laundering or some other criminal activity. FININT may also be involved in identifying financing of criminal and terrorist organisations.

Financial intelligence can be broken down into two main areas, collection and analysis. Collection is normally done by a government agency, know as a financial intelligence organisation or Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). The agency will collect raw transactional information and Suspicious activity reports (SAR) usually provided by banks and other entities as part of regulatory requirements. Data may be shared with other countries through intergovernmental networks.

Analysis, may consist of scrutinizing a large volume of transactional data using data mining or data-matching techniques to identify persons potentially engaged in a particular activity. SARs can also be scrutinized and linked with other data to try and identify specific activity.

FININT involves scrutinizing a large volume of transactional data, usually provided by banks and other entities as part of regulatory requirements. Alternatively, data mining or data-matching techniques may be employed to identify persons potentially engaged in a particular activity.

Many industrialized countries have regulatory reporting requirements for its financial organisations.

It may be possible for the FININT organization to obtain access to raw data at a financial organization. From a legal standpoint, this type of collection can be quite complex. For example, the CIA obtained access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) data streams through the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, but this violated Belgian privacy law.

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