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.