Content provided by Cognyte
By Matt O’Neill, Cybersecurity expert, retired U.S. Secret Service, Cognyte board of directors
Illicit funds are flowing faster than ever through cryptocurrency, shell company networks, real-time payments and other channels favored by criminals exploiting increasingly complex financial ecosystems. A recent Nasdaq report estimates that illicit financial activity has climbed by $1.3 trillion since 2023, reaching an estimated $4.4 trillion globally — “a compound annual growth rate of 19.2% that far outpaces the growth of the world economy.”
This surge in financial crimes has generated a flood of investigative data. Amid the deluge, pockets of the U.S intelligence community are onboarding huge volumes of commercially procured open-source intelligence (OSINT) data. Intensified oversight has revealed, however, that agencies aren’t sharing OSINT data efficiently or effectively, such that the Secret Service, HSI and/or FBI could be blind to meaningful activity in each other’s financial crime domains.
OSINT data is too important — and too expensive — to keep in silos, and regulators have taken notice.
Help is on the way
Recent U.S. federal legislation focused on OSINT shows growing momentum to formalize OSINT as a core capability for financial investigative units, forensic accountants and analysts. The Open-Source Intelligence Availability Act provisions embedded within the annual Intelligence Authorization Act (FY 2026) comprise a policy initiative aimed at making open-source data more systematically accessible and usable inside the U.S. intelligence community. Fully enacted, it will streamline the sharing of unclassified intel across the federal government.
This is important progress. Any legislation that empowers intelligence agencies to efficiently gather and leverage the data that they need to succeed is a win. Properly resourced financial and cybercrimes investigators, when they’re successful, recover and repatriate some of the massive sums funneled illicitly to criminal networks. These asset seizures deliver measurable ROI for the budget/taxpayer dollars spent.
OSINT data is diverse. It spans open databases, financial data providers, news aggregators, corporate records, cryptocurrency blockchain explorers and more. OSINT equips analysts to efficiently uncover hidden relationships, ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) and risk signals across publicly and commercially available data. Lawfully collected, location-based OSINT data is valuable to financial crimes units because it yields timely, cost-effective and actionable intelligence that can reveal and/or corroborate patterns not found among other datasets.
Intelligence agility
The ability to pivot across multiple datasets is critically important for investigators. It’s invaluable for temporal link analysis aimed at identifying relationships and networks, equipping investigators to understand who is talking to whom and how these relationships and schemes are interconnected via shell corporations and money mule networks.
The ability to sift these datasets is likewise critical, but it’s a manual, time-intensive workflow in most cases. It introduces friction when what’s needed is speed. When this analysis is confined within individual data silos, investigators lose peripheral visibility and can’t see the full intelligence landscape.
In this context, the sharing of OSINT data becomes crucial, and not just for budgetary reasons.
Technology transformation
Until recently, “state of the art” data intelligence tools were in many cases generic business intelligence products with federated search functions, retrofitted for investigative applications. The implementation was arduous and functionality was limited such that these tools could provide basic charts and graphs for court materials — but not much else of real value. Bulk data was difficult to accommodate in these environments and general level analysts were hard pressed to execute the sophisticated data querying and graphing functions required. Investigators are experts in financial crime, not data engineering, and the tools failed to bridge that gap.
At a macro level, the retirement and turnover rates among long-tenured analysts raise concerns about the loss of institutional knowledge. To fill the void, new analysts need to get up to speed quickly and legacy data intelligence tools have held them back.
AI-driven decision intelligence platforms with integrated data fusion and analysis are answering these challenges. By breaking down silos and synthesizing huge volumes of fragmented data for easier consumption, financial crimes investigators can gain meaningful, timely intelligence with unprecedented agility.
These capabilities allow analysts to traverse publicly and commercially available financial records, corporate registries, blockchain activity and location-based signals in a cohesive, centralized environment. OSINT data shareability — central to the Open-Source Intelligence Availability Act — is inherently strengthened with this “no silos” approach.
Purpose built AI assistants, tailored for financial crimes investigation, further ensure this data can be at the analyst’s fingertips in seconds, crunched in myriad ways and visualized in intuitive layouts. Liberated from the drudgery of manual data sifting and graphing, analysts can apply their talents where they’re needed most in the fight against financial crime. AI-automated investigative analytics and decision intelligence make this possible.
Faster analysis and frictionless data shareability are reasons enough to embrace this technology, but they aren’t the only reasons. Above all, financial crime investigators need tools that yield better intelligence. They need to see patterns more clearly. They need to surface hidden relationships more quickly. They need to validate/dismiss leads with more confidence. They need to be agile.
Less friction, more efficiency
To maximize the value of OSINT — and the federal budget funding it — it’s critical to overcome the persistent data silos and data fragmentation issues that have limited the value and shareability of vital intelligence. It’s likewise important to empower financial crime investigators with modern, intuitive tools that eliminate manual processes and accelerate intelligence assessments to keep pace with the fast-evolving, complex financial ecosystem.
OSINT data can be fused and analyzed with AI to uncover illicit, intentionally obscured financial ownership with unprecedented speed and clarity. Government regulators are paving the way for greater OSINT efficiencies in the future. The time to lay the technology foundation is now.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew O’Neill served as the deputy special agent in charge of cyberoperations at the United States Secret Service (USSS) until December 2023, where he directed the agency’s global cyberinvestigative strategies and oversaw efforts to dismantle transnational criminal networks. During his tenure, he achieved a 300% increase in cryptocurrency analytical capabilities, resulting in $60 million in cryptocurrency seizures in a single year. Previously, O’Neill served as the director of the Asset Forfeiture Branch, where he led an 816% increase in agency seizures totaling over $1.6 billion in assets, and managed $400 million in seized cryptocurrency assets.
As director of the Global Investigative Operations Center, he established the Secret Service’s first agencywide criminal investigative fusion center. O’Neill’s distinguished 25-year career includes leading groundbreaking cases, such as the takedown of a Vietnamese hacker case involving 300 million compromised Americans and $65 million in tax fraud. His achievements have been recognized with the DHS Exceptional Service Gold and Silver Medals and the U.S. Secret Service Special Agent of the Year Award. O’Neill holds certifications from Carnegie Mellon University and American University and earned his science degree from James Madison University. He currently serves as cofounder and partner at 5OH Consulting LLC.