Privacy Technologies for Financial Intelligence

Abstract: Financial crimes like terrorism financing and money laundering can have real impacts on society, including the abuse and mismanagement of public funds, increase in societal problems such as drug trafficking and illicit gambling with attendant economic costs, and loss of innocent lives in the case of terrorism activities. Complex financial crimes can be hard to detect primarily because data related to different pieces of the overall puzzle is usually distributed across a network of financial institutions, regulators, and law-enforcement agencies and they cannot be easily shared due to privacy constraints. Recent advances in Privacy-Preserving Data Matching and Machine Learning provide an opportunity for regulators and the financial industry to come together to solve the risk-discovery problem with technology. This paper provides a survey of the financial intelligence landscape and where opportunities lie for privacy technologies to improve the state-of-the-art in financial-crime detection.