What is Financial Intelligence?

Simplistically Financial Intelligence (FI) is the analysis of financial data to identify patterns, trends, anomalies and outliers for a specific purpose. Depending on the organisation performing the analysis the purpose differs.

Who Performs Financial Intelligence

Financial Intelligence analysis is performed by:

• Financial institutions. All financial services organisations perform some financial intelligence analysis, the most common being analysis for marketing, sales and fraud (which directly hits the organisations bottom line - thus is a high priority).
• Governments. The reason that governments perform financial intelligence analysis include: hardening the financial system against criminal abuse, identifying and disrupting money laundering, ensuring fairness in the taxation system, ensuring the sustainability of the welfare system, etc.... A single financial institution can not perform this function in isolation as they are only able to see the transaction activity of their customers. They can not see the transaction activity of entities across the economy. Through regulation government's aim to pull information from across a country's financial sector to obtain a complete view of an entity's activity. The analysis of Financial Intelligence data alongside real word activity, often referred to as "Following the Money" can often provide transparency to nefarious activity.

The Financial Intelligence explained on this website is focused on government financial intelligence analysis for two reasons. Firstly cause government financial intelligence is the basis of FI-Comp and secondly as it is a superset of the analytical functions performed by financial institutions.