The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), received over 60,000 reports on Suspicious Transactions and Activities and over 15 million Currency Transactions in 2023, its Director/Chief Executive Officer, Hafsat Abubakar Bakari, disclosed in Abuja.
Bakari spoke at the maiden consultative Summit between the NFIU and Law Enforcement Agencies on Wednesday.
Bakari who dwelled on the role of NFIU in fighting crimes within Nigeria’s security architecture, said as a result of dynamic and fast-paced nature of the modern crime environment, particularly for the most serious offences like fraud, corruption and terrorism, the volume of financial reports received and analyzed to follow the money trail has increased significantly in recent times.
Consequently, she said the only truly sustainable approach towards crime prevention and disruption was to identify where these funds are and denying criminal actors access to them.
To understand the underlying criminal offences in these transactions, she said the NFIU must have in place efficient and effective systems for conducting financial analysis, to be able to provide law enforcement agencies credible, reliable and actionable financial intelligence in a timely manner.
She said the Summit, which is being planned to be a regular event, was organised as a programme of strategic external engagement with Heads of Agencies responsible for acting on the intelligence NFIU provides, as a means of gathering feedback on its performance.
Although NFIU does not investigate, arrest or prosecute offenders, she said this allows the agency to focus on areas of its core competence, including receiving and analysing financial reports, to follow the money trail for law enforcement agencies.
She said the dynamism of the criminal environment poses several challenges which must be overcome if the NFIU was to continue to produce the intelligence reports on crimes on a consistent basis.
“The volume of data that we receive and analyse on a regular basis is huge, and will only continue to grow in the future as financial inclusion, decentralised finance and other emerging technologies shift transactions into the electronic space.
She stressed need to deploy new technologies, which provide a layer of anonymity and complexity to transactions.
“From crypto-currency to agency banking, the link between the owner of the funds and the transaction itself is becoming more opaque, as a result of the increasingly transparent borders due electronic applications.
Apart from funds and money, she said transactions move rapidly across financial institutions, digital platforms and through underground banking systems, even as the country’s systems for international cooperation are subjected to the frictions put in place by national borders, information silos and non-cooperative jurisdictions.
To address these challenges, the NFIU boss proposed a number of strategic priorities, including concerted efforts to improve the utilisation of technology tools across all the competent authorities.
Although many law enforcement agencies have already made significant investments in procuring and establishing databases and other platforms, she said interconnectivity remained a major challenge.
To become more effective, she said the law enforcement agencies should ensure that all databases and platforms were built to common standards and shared protocols, to allow for seamless integration and connectivity.
Also, she said priority attention should be given to the integration of the various identity databases to enable NFIU to integrate financial flows with communication data and case records.
“Building these integrated systems and deploying new tools, utilising artificial intelligence and machine learning has the potential to transform the speed at which we can intercept and disrupt criminal networks.
“We should also develop a national financial crimes database which holds information on investigations, prosecutions, convictions as well as sentences and proceeds of crime. This will enable us to make better policy decisions to respond to changes in crime typologies.
Besides, she said the creation of fusion cells and joint investigation teams should be encouraged to target the highest risk offences and the most serious crime networks.
She pointed out that this would end the practice where various requests for information from different authorities are made to the NFIU by multiple agencies targeting and investigating the same individuals and crime networks.
“This often leads to duplication of efforts and inefficient use of resources. By working together, law enforcement agencies can utilise the comparative advantage of each authority in a more efficient manner,” she said.
On the need to prioritise international cooperation, she said many of the crimes NFIU combat were trans-national in nature, as often the commission of the act may happen in other jurisdictions, while the perpetrators may not be within the country’s borders, or the proceeds transferred as illicit financial flows.
Through networks such as the Egmont Group of FIUs, INTERPOL and other informal channels, she said available information could support investigative activities and point to assets which could be repatriated.
“These informal networks provide the basis for activating formal cooperation measures such as Mutual Legal Assistance requests through the Central Authority Unit which provide evidence for effective prosecution and asset recovery.
Nigeria, she pointed out, has been on the list of jurisdictions under monitoring by the Financial Action Task Force since February 2023, adding that an assessment found significant deficiencies in its laws, institutions and systems to combat money laundering, terrorist financing and financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
