Financial intelligence, data against economic crime

“Criminal organizations have profoundly changed their operating model. They increasingly operate as sophisticated economic entities: they acquire businesses, invest capital, use international corporate networks, participate in public procurement and exploit the opportunities offered by digital finance. It is a phenomenon that alters competition, compromises investor confidence and represents a real risk for the development of the production system“.

In this context, the classic follow the money methodology introduced by Giovanni Falcone requires a technological evolution focused on the management of big data, an area in which the State inspection bodies are concentrating growing analytical resources. The complexity of today’s financial flows requires the adoption of advanced computational systems. The integration of artificial intelligence architectures and machine learning algorithms allow you to analyze massive volumes of transactions, identifying anomalous patterns and structural risk indicators in real time.

Paola La Salvia, Senior Officer of the Financial Police and expert in economic-financial intelligence and criminal analysis

However, the sophistication of the software requires a layer of specialist interpretation, since, as Paola La Salvia points out: “The availability of data is no longer sufficient. The real competitive advantage consists in the ability to interpret them and transform them into knowledge useful for guiding public and private decisions.”


Artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced data analysis techniques now allow us to identify correlations and risk indicators with a speed that was unthinkable until a few years ago.



. “Technology, however, does not replace human judgment. Algorithms identify anomalies, but only economic-financial analysis is able to attribute meaning to them and transform them into prevention tools“.

The data provided by the control agencies confirm the urgency of an analytical and interpretation-bound approach
. According to Europol reports, approximately 70% of criminal organizations active in the European Union use legal corporate vehicles to disguise illicit activities, and over 80% exploit complex corporate networks for capital laundering. On the national front, The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Bank of Italy annually processes over 150 thousand reports of suspicious transactions. Managing this amount of information requires an infrastructure capable of combining computational speed with the field experience of law enforcement. “Protecting strategic infrastructures, production chains and investments means strengthening the country’s competitiveness. In the coming years,”
concludes La Salvia“the real challenge will not be to collect more and more data, but to transform it into knowledge, integrating technological innovation, economic-financial skills and interpretative capacity. Because today the protection of economic legality increasingly coincides with the protection of development“.