The New Zealand Police’s Financial Crime Group, The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) has partnered with Acumen BI as part of its Service Delivery Transformation Project.
Tasked to deliver improved tools for prioritisation, database integration and analysis of financial intelligence, Acumen BI will assist NZ Police in its Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts by enhancing its ability to directly identify previously unknown targets and trends.
Acumen BI’s Data & Analytics Practise Lead, Daniel Gargiulo, has ten years’ experience as an analyst and is focussed on using data to enable organisations to drive change through evidence-based decision making with a strong focus on automating manual tasks.
The FIU produces The Suspicious Activity Report which is comprised of FIU holdings and open-source media reporting collected within the last month. In the May 2021 edition, an overview of the engagement is provided along with the FIU’s monthly statistics.
See below for a summary of Acumen BI’s important work in partnership with NZ Police.
2020 Mutual Evaluation FIU Actions
As mentioned in last month’s edition of The Suspicious Activity Report, one of the priority improvements recommended by the FATF after the 2020 Mutual Evaluation was to improve the FIU’s tools for prioritisation, database integration, and analysis of financial intelligence to enhance its ability to directly identify previously unknown targets and trends.
The FIU is well underway with implementing changes related to this recommendation with Acumen BI having been selected to provide a new intelligence platform to improve FIU analysis, refine the FIU prioritisation process, support leads discovery, and expand the reach and impact of financial intelligence across all FIU clients.
We have invited Acumen BI’s Data and Analytics Practise Lead, Daniel Gargiulo, to provide a high-level description of the new platform the FIU has selected and will implement later this year.
Active Intelligence to support AML/CFT
Daniel Gargiulo is the Data and Analytics Practise Lead with Acumen BI, who has been selected to partner with the FIU on their Service Delivery Transformation Project. With over ten years’ experience as an analyst including 8 years with Acumen BI, he has focussed on using data to enable organisations to drive change through evidence-based decision making with a strong focus on automating manual tasks.
To meet the FIU’s diverse requirements and outcomes, the core technologies Acumen BI are implementing include Qlik and Data Robot. These technologies and Acumen BI’s partnership approach will allow New Zealand Police (NZ Police) to take ownership of the intelligence platform, ensuring there is the flexibility for it to evolve over time as the nature of the AML/CFT environment changes.
Qlik will allow the FIU to build complex data models that combine multiple data sets together to answer a wide range of questions. These interactive Qlik Applications use proprietary technology that allow users at all levels of the organisation to freely explore, ask, and answer questions of the data on the fly and discover new insights.
Data Robot provides a machine learning platform which will be used by the FIU to develop and deploy anomaly detection models to enhance the capabilities of the FIU to detect illicit activity and identify previously unknown targets.
These technologies will significantly improve the processing, analysis and dissemination of intelligence information and provide the flexibility to meet a diverse and increasingly dynamic range of requirements.
Diverse Use Cases
The intelligence platform will play a key role in supporting NZ Police meeting its AML/CFT outcomes. The FIU will use the intelligence platform for a wide variety of use cases including proactive lead identification, supporting law enforcement operations, and making goAML, Companies Register and property information more accessible to the Asset Recovery Unit, the National Organised Crime Group, and wider NZ Police investigators and intelligence staff. The platform will also support the dissemination of information to Sector Supervisors to support feedback and compliance monitoring.
An excellent example of where active intelligence has driven real outcomes is the Brazilian Court of Audit (TCU). They now analyse more than 100 databases containing over 7 terabytes of data, all of which is used by 1,100 auditors across the Brazilian Federal government to identify network relationships, collusion, fraud, corruption, and non-compliance to regulations.
Acumen BI is looking forward to partnering with the FIU team and NZ Police to deliver on this important initiative and ensure the FIU are future proofing themselves as the nature of money laundering and counter financing terrorism changes.
About Acumen BI
Acumen BI is a New Zealand company that is highly experienced in implementing end to end data and analytics platforms. A key part of their service is transitioning users and technical staff from working within the constraints of traditional reporting paradigms, to making use of the dynamic and flexible best of breed technology such as Qlik, Data Robot and Snowflake. Acumen BI work with enterprise clients throughout New Zealand across Government, Health, Public and Private organisations including the Ministry of Health, New Zealand Transport Agency, Tertiary Education Commission and more.
About Qlik
Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. Qlik provides an end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics cloud platform to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik does business in more than 100 countries and serves over 50,000 customers around the world.
About Data Robot
Data Robot is an industry leader delivering trusted machine learning technology and enablement services to global enterprises competing in today’s Intelligence Revolution. Data Robot’s platform democratizes data science with end-to-end automation for building, deploying, and managing machine learning models. This platform maximizes business value by delivering machine learning at scale and continuously optimizing performance over time. The company’s proven combination of cutting-edge software and world-class machine learning implementation, training, and support services empowers any organisation – regardless of size, industry, or resources – to drive better business outcomes.