Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)
FinCEN is a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury whose mission is to safeguard the financial system from illicit use and combat money laundering. FinCEN promotes national security through the collection, analysis, and dissemination of financial intelligence and strategic use of financial authorities. FinCEN needed Onyx to identify those entities that were facilitating funds transfers to sanctioned countries.
Issues:
- Due to abbreviations, alternate spellings, and errors, transaction data from banks sometimes contains duplicates.
- Illicit entities will “layer” transactions, shifting money through multiple shell companies.
- FinCEN needed to determine which entities are providing the funds which flow to sanctioned countries.
- Criminals use many aspects of the financial system to generate and move money.
- Most query systems return individual pieces of data from queries, representing a fragmented view of the criminal’s behavior.
- Analyzing the results are a time consuming activity and prone to error.
Solutions:
- Used best practices and custom coding for data munging and entity recognition to determine which transactions involve the same entity.
- Used network analysis tools and statistics to analyze patterns of transactions.
- Build scalable database that absorbs billions of records and ties persons and organizations together based on layers of expert rules.
- Provide a single and easy-to-use interface that returns dossier-style information replete with downloadable summary information for easy dissemination and report generation.
Results:
- Provided international law enforcement and US Treasury investigators with leads on previously unidentified funders of terrorist states and groups.
- Enhanced bureau capabilities with entity resolution techniques.
- Helped catch the bad guys.
- Reduced analyst research time by up to 40%.
- Simplified the steps of collecting various pieces of information from the platform.
- Built a consistent and flexible ETL pipeline consolidating different data sources for further analysis. Increased the accuracy of research.
- Provided entry level analysts a powerful tool that greatly improves performance and reduces risk of error.