Seven UK banks are sharing data with the National Crime Agency to help fight organised crime, in an initiative believed to be the largest of its kind in the world.
The banks are providing the NCA with account data that indicates potential economic crime. A joint team will analyse this alongside the agency’s own data, with the resulting intelligence being used to inform the NCA’s investigations and help the banks identify risk.
The NCA says that since going operationally live in May, the project has supported the agency’s “highest priority operations” against threats such as organised immigration crime, fraud and money laundering.
In one high-priority fraud investigation, intelligence from the project has helped focus operational resource on new subjects of interest and identified new lines of enquiry, the agency said.
Overall, the project has so far provided 90 “intelligence packages” to support NCA and wider law enforcement investigations.
According to Reuters, the banks participating include NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds.
Adrian Searle, the director of the NCA’s National Economic Crime Centre, said it was the first time this approach has been tried on such a scale anywhere in the world.
“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,” said Searle. “This joint working is a truly innovative approach to try and prevent this criminality.”
He explained that the project is “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.”
Data from the scheme has also been used to identify eight new organised crime networks so far, which are being evaluated by the NCA.
And three intelligence packages have been shared with banking partners “to assist their understanding of the threat” and improve their defences.
This initiative follows a pilot involving the NCA and two UK banks between 2021 and 2022. This showed that the data-sharing approach can provide intelligence in a way that balances public protection with customer privacy, the agency said.
It added that the partners have designed data-sharing principles to make sure that “only account data with multiple clear indicators of economic crime is included”.