Embracing Modern Day Financial Intelligence

Financial companies, awash with business data, have made the natural progression into providing financial intelligence, known as FININT, on top of their market analysis, credit ratings and equity trading information.

FININT can provide crucial insights into adversarial behaviors or risks to the military or to homeland security. And when paired with signals intelligence, or open-source, human, military, geospatial and other forms of intelligence, FININT can be illuminating in ways that give the military or investigators an advantage, financial data experts say.

“The hallmark of FININT is its foundation in structured or quantitative data,” explained Lewis Shepherd, longtime leader on the AFCEA Intelligence Committee. “But we have seen analysts become much more adept at multimodal analytics, blending financial data and analysis of other structured data sets from SIGINT [signals intelligence] with unstructured data analysis from OSINT [open-source intelligence] or HUMINT [human intelligence].”

New York-based Moody’s, known for its credit ratings for borrowing and lending, is stepping up to support those in national security with FININT. In the last several years, the company has invested in tools and personnel to provide such intelligence. And it is not just about financial-related crimes, shared Jason Lee, a senior director at Moody’s. 

“A lot of people believe if you have financial data, it is only going to be relevant for financial crimes,” Lee shared. “But there is a real effect on nonfinancial crimes. You see the behavior, and that behavior now makes it indicative of what intelligence analysts have always tried to get to, and that’s the four magic W’s, who, what, where, when.”

Lee, formerly with the FBI, specializes in intelligence and investigations tradecraft and how to turn data into insights and actionable intelligence. He adds, “I think there is no better timing than now for government agencies, particularly, but also the private sector, to use business content. The fact is the bad guys are getting more savvy. They know what sources investigators are using. Business provides that perfect kind of nonobvious, ‘keep them guessing,’ source for content that allows the investigators to get that advantage back.”

For the last year at Moody’s, Lee has helped identify some of the biggest data gaps and pain points for a number of organizations—three-letter agencies in the intelligence community, including federal law enforcement, as well as civilian agencies.

For example, the Department of Commerce (DOC) assists the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States program, vetting mergers and acquisitions. The People’s Republic of China, Russia and other adversarial countries might be looking to purchase companies in the United States and alter the supply chain. Moody’s is tying together the DOC’s business data with other data layers to gain insights.

“One area on which I have been focusing is geospatial data,” Lee shared. “We are taking business information, and then where we have locations or where employees are based, we can see the trading of goods between different companies that are in our Orbis database and other resources that we have here at Moody’s. We can see how that data actually colors in geospatial information from agencies like the Department of Defense (DOD), the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or from domestic agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”

In addition, DHS agencies working to fight fentanyl trafficking and other drug issues can benefit from commercial real estate data. Having the locations of businesses can help identify how legitimate activities that bad actors are participating in might help reveal, in parallel, what they are doing on the nefarious side, Lee said.

“Along with geospatial intelligence is the focus on the means, modes and methods of bad actors,” he noted. “With fentanyl or methamphetamine, or other synthetic drugs, you are not sure if a company that has a lot of shell companies, if they are involved in that illegal business. You could actually get a list of precursor chemicals, chemicals that the drug traffickers and illegal drug manufacturers use, and cross-reference that to see if the target of your investigation is operating a legitimate company. That would give you reasonable cause, at least from a circumstantial evidence standpoint, that a particular individual and his or her company may be involved in fentanyl or methamphetamine or other synthetic drug production.”

Even with advanced data processing technologies, certain types of criminals are difficult to analyze. Transnational organized criminal organizations often have access to complex, multilayered financial networks that span across jurisdictions, and naturally, cyber criminals, especially if they are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to create more automated and scaled nefarious operations, can be challenging to detect. Typically, analysts or investigators employ entity resolution to find the correct name or identity to tie the data together to create a bigger picture. Now it is about reconstructing an identity with multiple data sets, which could even be multilingual.

“Economic espionage has a centuries-long pedigree, but modern FININT really lends itself to modern economic statecraft and decision-maker support on tariffs or competitive trade policy,” Shepherd added. “Our new ability to use financial intelligence in real-time dashboards and even as feeds for autonomous agentic AI operations may prove to be critical in shaping successful hybrid warfare options.”

In addition, Moody’s is developing capabilities around automated insights, creating automated typology or criteria-based algorithms to detect and find notable information, as well as using advancing machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI decision-making tools.

“As we go into the future, the idea is to create ‘crawlers’ that help lay investigators with no financial background actually ask questions of a natural language processor and have the computer do what they call ‘tipping and queuing,’” Lee explained. These types of intelligence indicators will prompt analysts or investigators to look at certain data to advance their investigations.

Moody’s Orbis business database holds 6 terabytes of data, covering 190 countries, 580 million companies and 450 million individuals tied to those companies. For them, it was also important to tie in real estate data from several real estate companies with which they are working—as an added layer of data, Lee said.

“That is not our core wheelhouse, and we don’t want to get into that kind of business, but we wanted to reach out to them because that’s their bailiwick,” Lee noted. “The idea is to combine data and have a force multiplier.”

“FININT matured as intelligence agencies collaborated with financial or regulatory organizations who were studying or combating money laundering and tax evasion,” Shepherd explained. “The shared data from increasingly digitized currency and payments systems wound up being novel sources of insight for intelligence on terror financing or illicit weapons transfers, and today that data is indispensable.”

Meanwhile Bloomberg, also based in New York, is harnessing FININT and business data for its clients, explained George Ferguson, senior analyst for aerospace, defense and airline research at Bloomberg Intelligence. 

“I do think the intel world and the financial analysis world have a lot of similarities,” said Ferguson, a former intelligence officer who served as an Army S2 supporting a military intelligence battalion during the Iraq war. 

“When I was in Iraq, I would look at the secret intel systems to figure out what was going on in theater, because it was an S2’s job really to tell the commander where the risks are,” he explained. “So that the commander can make an informed decision about how to deploy his or her troops, where he or she is willing to bear risk, where they have unknowns that he or she wants to manage. And then to get a really good perspective, you have to overlay it with nonsecret, open-source information. I would also spend a lot of time reading the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and all kinds of media on Iraq and the political players and factors that were influencing the country.” 

Today, Ferguson is using his expertise, and financial statement filings, news reports and other data points to analyze companies. “To sort of put it into intel speak, I look at all of their open-source information to try to build a perspective on the company’s future financial performance,” he said.

It is this financial perspective that can reveal important factors for the military, especially regarding understanding supply chain issues—an important linchpin for risks. 

“Supply chains, obviously, are critical to a nation’s ability to stand up a military and be a credible deterrent or a threat,” Ferguson stated. “And we’ll spend a lot of our days thinking about the supply chains, and specifically, supply chains for the most important weapon systems.”

With the People’s Republic of China controlling the vast majority of the rare earth mineral supply—materials that provide the necessary components for electronics and a whole host of commercial and military technologies—the risk to the United States is great. 

In early July, the DOD formed a public-private partnership with Las Vegas-based MP Materials Corp. to increase U.S. supplies and reduce exposure to supply chain risks from China. 

Under the agreement, MP would build a second domestic magnet manufacturing facility, called the 10X facility, at a location yet to be determined. The fully integrated producer would mine, process, conduct advanced metallization and produce rare earth magnets, with the facility eventually reaching 10,000 metric tons of manufacturing capacity. 

“DOD has agreed to take all of their productive capacity,” Ferguson confirmed. “From a financial perspective, we knew that China was pretty deep in the rare earth business, and that it was hard for any other company in the world to break into that business, because of the externalities that people in other parts of the world were not willing to bear, especially with China’s typical strategy around the world to drive down prices and drive out competitors. And now we’re seeing the U.S. DOD invest in this company and put a price floor agreement in place. And now General Motors already is also involved with the company.”

The military’s step, Ferguson noted, illuminates how the DOD is concerned enough about rare earth minerals that it is willing to invest in companies to start and secure a U.S. supply chain. 

“These magnets matter to drones, they matter to electric vehicles, all technologies that the Pentagon is, I’m sure, very interested in, especially as they continue to develop autonomous land and air vehicles,” he ventured. “It again confirms for us that the strategy at DOD is going to be, ‘look, what we need is more autonomous capability.’”

Moreover, Ferguson does not discount the possibly of DOD investing in another such company.

“We know from things like shipbuilding that it is hard to really have a successful industry without bringing commercial along, because commercial helps bring the volumes, which helps drive down prices,” Ferguson offered. “And it is also those volumes that help train the workforce, train the company to be more efficient…. and could they do this again in another company, I think so. I think there will be more capacity and build the business for the commercial users as well, so they can pull more of this out of China.”