The National Crime Agency and seven UK banks have forged a significant public-private partnership to identify criminality using banking data.
In a statement on 26 July, the NCA said the "ground-breaking" agreement with the participating banks involved providing it with account data indicative of potential criminality.
Subject matter experts and investigators from the NCA and the banks have formed a joint team to analyse the data, alongside the NCA’s own data. Any intelligence outputs will inform the NCA’s investigative work and help the banks to identify risk.
Use of financial intelligence in such a way will better protect the public from serious and organised crime, and protect the integrity of the UK’s financial system.
Adrian Searle, director of the National Economic Crime Centre in the NCA said: “At the moment, criminals can exploit the banking system to move money at pace across international borders in ways that law enforcement has struggled to prevent. This joint working is a truly innovative approach to try and prevent this criminality. It is the first time this has been tried on such a scale anywhere in the world.
"We are bringing together targeted bank transaction data with the crime related data sets the NCA can access. This should enable our respective analytical teams to detect and disrupt criminality, and reduce the risk banks are managing, that may otherwise have been unknown.
"It could also pave the way for the future ambition to use real time data insight to prevent economic and associated crimes.”
Since going operationally live in May, the project has already delivered 90 intelligence packages in support of both NCA and wider law enforcement investigations.
The project has provided support to the NCA’s highest priority operations against threats including organised immigration crime, fraud and money laundering. For example, in one high-priority fraud investigation, the intelligence shared by this project has helped focus operational resource on new subjects of interest and identified new lines of enquiry.
The analytical team are also working to identify new organised crime networks as well as using data science to better understand how criminals are exploiting the financial system. Eight such networks have already been identified, which are being evaluated by the NCA. In addition, three intelligence packages have been shared with banking partners to assist their understanding of the threat and to improve their defences against organised crime.
This initiative builds on a previous limited pilot delivered collaboratively by the NCA and two UK banks between October 2021 and February 2022. This original pilot tested the practicality and benefit of fusing banking sector data and serious and organised crime data, to better identify and disrupt economic crime and protect the public.
The pilot demonstrated that this model – where banks share relevant data with the NCA – can deliver valuable intelligence for law enforcement and financial institutions to identify and disrupt criminal activity, and that it can be done in a way that balances the protection of the public from economic crime with the protection of customer privacy.
The NCA and its banking partners have designed the data sharing principles to ensure that only account data with multiple clear indicators of economic crime is included.
The data provided by banking sector partners only includes information on customers (people or businesses) that meet a set of markers which are indicative of potential criminal behaviour.
The volume of accounts identified represents a very small fraction of the UK total.
