What is financial intelligence analysis: From a defensive to a proactive approach

Risk management is not only about financial transactions, it’s about abstract relationships connected by commerce and conducted by those who go to great lengths to appear completely legitimate. What is financial intelligence analysis? It’s a valuable tool for intelligence and risk management that can be used for both a defensive and a proactive approach.

The defensive approach
What is financial intelligence analysis? According to Wikipedia, one of the main goals of financial intelligence “is to identify financial transactions that may involve tax evasion, money laundering or some other criminal activity”. Defensive financial intelligence analysis activities protect the organization by identifying risky behavior (the customer who makes big investments without the funds to back it up) and suspicious transactions (such as those with black-listed countries or organizations) before they have a chance to hurt the business. A defensive approach is important, but it’s just one part of a solid financial intelligence strategy.

The proactive approach
A strategic and proactive approach to financial intelligence analysis gives the user more decision making power when it comes to protecting assets from risk and fraud. A proactive approach involves a unified view of information at the speed of real-time events. It enables intercepting weak signals and trends before they become reality.
Monitoring activities–for competitors and market trends–are able to exploit all kinds of financial data and news streams for their intelligence value. By automatically extracting and correlating this information that is otherwise impossible to analyze manually, analysts can choose whether to or how to modify their investment decisions or whom to do business with well in advance.

Cognitive technology for financial analysis
What is financial intelligence analysis? Simply put, we can say that it provides the financial knowledge you need to protect or to add value to your business. The problem is, how can we collect, understand and analyze the mass of information necessary (structured or unstructured, qualitative or quantitative, traditional or less common, hidden or easy to detect, inside or outside the organization) for our analysis?

It’s here that the cognitive technology Cogito can help. Cogito allows financial organizations to take full advantage of information to make fast and informed decisions on portfolio and investment strategies. Thanks to its cognitive capabilities based on artificial intelligence algorithms that mimic the human ability to read and understand, Cogito makes vast amounts of content easily and immediately accessible, enriches quantitative analysis methods, and develops customized sensors that constantly monitor information flows.