The country's financial intelligence will now be on a comprehensive digital platform to help enforcement agencies gain real time access to critical information and faster analysis of suspicious transactions.
Finance Ministry sources said the computerisation of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-IND), which investigates and disseminates sensitive information between financial and law enforcement agencies for identification of suspicious money laundering, is already on.
"Financial Intelligence Network will be a major reform initiated by the Ministry. All the banks are already connected to us but the new network will enable electronic data entry and analysis on a real time basis of suspicious transactions," the sources said.
They said the new technology has been introduced because of the changing dynamics of financial crimes and the need for a faster scrutiny of all available inputs. The platform is being prepared by software giant Wipro and will be called FINnet.
"Most of the bigger crimes have a financial aspect to it. The FIU-IND therefore acts like the key player to unravel many of the financial trails of various individuals," the sources said.
Last year over 4,000 suspicious financial transactions relating to crime, terror and others were analysed by the FIU-IND.
In an effort to identify patterns of money laundering, terrorist financing and other economic crimes, the government also scanned about 55,11,150 cash transactions of at least Rs 55,111.5 crore.
Each cash transaction that was monitored and reported to the FIU-IND, a government agency to investigate and disseminate information between financial and law enforcement agencies for identification of suspicious money laundering, had at least Rs 10 lakh in it, the sources said.
The government also received 69 requests of information from foreign financial intelligence units, while it sent 17 such requests to other countries.
