Seeing through the data fog: Investigative tech comes of age

Seeing through the data fog: Investigative tech comes of age

Establishing the facts in fraud, bribery and other probes has always been a lengthy and painstaking task. And the challenge has been heightened by having to scan through endless data from more sources than ever.

Alongside emails, board minutes and phone records, there are now texts, instant messages, social media communications and publicly sourced intelligence. On the transactional side, you could now be trawling through millions of rows and columns of accounting, trading and market data.

The even bigger challenge is collecting together the evidence from all these multiple sources to reveal the patterns in the case – linking text communications to suspicious trades and financial reporting, for example.

Investigation map

In response to this challenge, a new generation of technology is coming on-stream. Key innovations include our platform that enables investigators to bring all the evidence together in one place, connect the various dots and place the findings on a timeline. The result is an investigation map that visualises the critical patterns within the case.

Benefits include cutting through the fog of data and often sophisticated concealment that might otherwise have allowed wrongdoing to remain hidden, or difficult to prove. For example, we could map and connect different types of evidence to pinpoint preferential pricing among traders and counter-parties and how.

By honing-in on trades that didn’t fit the pricing pattern seen elsewhere, joining this to various communications and matching these threads against the timeline in accounting records, we were able to show which people within the company were acting in collusion with the counter-party to facilitate corrupt payments.

Fast-advancing field

The other big benefit of embracing technology is freeing up investigators from a lot of time-consuming legwork, so they can bring their expertise to bear in evaluating the evidence, consolidating findings and applying the lessons to help safeguard your business.

This is never going to be an entirely automated field. Investigators’ insight is still critical in identifying the threads that the technology helps to shed light on and then turning this into a credible case. But the technology is advancing so fast that it may soon be able to lead investigators to the most incriminating evidence based on only an initial hypothesis and key entities.

Sharpening up your capabilities

How then can your team make the most of these advancing capabilities?

● Know what is available: New tools and platforms are coming on to the market all the time. Therefore, it is important to keep abreast of what is available, what’s most useful for the investigations you are likely to be running and how you can bring all those different tools together in the most effective way.

● Build technology into new operating models: Investigation technology is developing so fast that it is important to judge how this will affect the way you work and make plans for how to use your staff resources in the most effective way.

● Tap into wider tech developments within the business: The tech capabilities being developed and applied within your business could provide useful aids to investigations. For example, we were able to draw on the GPS tracking fitted within a company’s delivery lorries to show a pattern of unauthorised drop-offs. It is therefore important to work closely with your company’s IT team to find out what is being implemented and how this might help with your work.

So, new technology can help your business to get to the bottom of complex cases quicker and more effectively. And with more developments on their way, this is an area to keep a close watch on.

This article first appeared in The Lawyer.

By Umang Paw and Claire Halstead.