Financial transactions are a crucial element in the undertaking of criminal investigations,
especially (but not exclusively) in their increasingly globalized dimension.
Access to banking records and following the financial paper (or today, rather
digital) trail have become imperative operations to effectively combat quite an
extensive range of offences, starting from the very core from which financial investigative
techniques have been developed—mainly money laundering, organised
crime and terrorist financing—and progressively involving other forms of serious
crimes, such as corruption, tax fraud, obstruction of public procurement or grant
procedures, market abuse, human trafficking, or cybercrime. Often carried out in
parallel to traditional fact-finding criminal inquiries, financial investigations consists
in those techniques which allow to chase the “movement of money during the
course of criminal activity” (i.e. when the money is received, where it is stored or
deposited),1 and to identify and trace beneficiaries, as well as the material benefit
acquired (also through third persons) by the criminal offence.2
Dealing today with banking investigations and financial investigative techniques,
however, means dealing with much more extended implications than it perhaps
entailed only a few decades ago.