How combined corporate and trade data helps governments combat financial crime
As the methods to commit financial crime evolve, so do legislative and enforcement responses.
In the UK, the 2023 Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act (ECCTA) was introduced to tackle economic crime and improve transparency of UK corporate entities. In 2024, the Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation (OTSI) was launched to strengthen the UK’s implementation and enforcement of trade sanctions.
But statistics show it will be a long and arduous journey to eradicate financial crime. The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates it’s highly likely that over £12bn of criminal cash is generated annually in the UK. They assess the scale of money laundering impacting on the UK is in the hundreds of billions of pounds annually.
Thankfully, combined corporate and trade data is proving to be an increasingly effective tool for investigators to fight financial crime.
The value of corporate records and trade data
Government sanctions lists, export controls, and other lists are used to disrupt and deter illicit activity and can serve as a starting point for further investigation. However, these methods are inherently incomplete and unable to keep pace with the adaptations of national security threats and criminal networks. Watchlists, for example, are helpful but become more powerful when integrated with global corporate and trade data, which can proactively reveal unlisted entities in the ownership and commercial networks of those entities.
Integrated global corporate and trade data bring transparency to corporate networks and enable investigators to efficiently identify ownership, control, and commercial networks of target entities.
Illicit actors often obfuscate control of their companies by creating complex, cross-border ownership structures. Tracing ownership through multiple jurisdictions manually can be a time-intensive process, but software solutions that fuse global datasets and resolve entities across jurisdictions can significantly accelerate those efforts. Integrated global corporate data similarly enables investigators to more effectively discover unknown related parties across jurisdictions that may not have otherwise been the focus of their investigation.
While corporate data brings visibility into corporate ownership and control, trade data illuminates companies’ trading partners and the movement of goods across borders. It enables investigators to further map the commercial networks of target entities and identify potentially illicit trade based on the counterparties involved in a shipment or on the goods and trade routes themselves.
Here are examples of how corporate data and trade data are helping investigators identify and counter financial crime.
Uncovering money laundering
Illicit actors are increasingly turning to cryptocurrency as a vehicle for money laundering and financial fraud due to the speed of transaction processing, the pseudo-anonymity of account holders’ identifying information, and limited regulatory oversight.
In 2022, the Estonian National Criminal Police and the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested and charged two Estonian nationals for allegedly running a vast cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering operation to the tune of approximately $575m in damages. Investigators used both blockchain analysis and official public records to uncover the scheme by Hashflare.io.
Exploring the Estonian nationals’ commercial networks using official public records also revealed possible vectors of off-chain financial crime. The nationals co-owned more than a dozen additional corporate entities based in Estonia and Switzerland, any one of which may have been used to facilitate the duo’s alleged fraudulent schemes or launder the proceeds derived from those schemes.
The two Estonian nationals pleaded guilty in early 2025 for their operation of this massive, multi-faceted cryptocurrency scheme that victimized hundreds of thousands of people globally.
This type of analysis into corporate records illustrates how investigators can uncover ultimate beneficial owners, discover key relationships between businesses and people, and accelerate cross-border investigations.
Illuminating sanctions evasion
The UK and the European Union (EU) continue to sanction Russian entities and third country facilitators in an effort to stem the flow of funds and equipment fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In response, Russia has evolved its tactics and pivoted to alternate networks and geographic hotspots.
A recent investigation by a Dutch current affairs television program uncovered the transshipment of dual-use components to Russia. Using trade data layered with corporate data, investigative journalists traced shipments of components for a Russian vessel building project. Before sanctions, these products went to Russia through the Dutch manufacturer. The trade data showed that, after sanctions, these same Dutch products were shipped from newly established companies in Turkey and China.
EU regulations require companies to thoroughly investigate potential indirect sales to sanctioned parties. After investigating, the Dutch customs’ Post-Export Supervision and Sanctions (POSS) team concluded that illegal exports may have occurred.
In another example, corporate and trade data reveal how Russia is likely retaining access to the global financial market despite international sanctions. Russia has been blocked from accessing Western currencies through sanctions but found alternatives to the traditional global banking system to acquire these currencies. An analysis of Russian trade data revealed shipments of bulk currency – including U.S. dollars and Euros – from entities in Turkey and Dubai to Russia. These shipments were shortly followed by exports of gold from Russia to the same Turkish and Emirati entities.
Trade data helps enforcement authorities uncover transshipments and dual-use technology shipments and confirm regulatory compliance.
Putting corporate and trade data to work
To get maximum value from the vast trove of corporate and trade data, investigators need an efficient way to mine and analyze it.
Sayari enables this efficiency by accessing registries, parsing the documents, and then resolving discrete records into more than 2.7 billion comprehensive entity profiles enriched with watchlist, trade, and risk data. Its flagship solution, Sayari Graph, further enhances this efficiency by enabling investigative teams to easily search, translate, and disambiguate these profiles. Graph’s network visualisation capabilities illuminate corporate ownership and illustrate global trade networks, making it easy to see relationships and probe further into areas of interest.
Graph provides insight into financial crime and related risks by identifying entities’ list-based network risk (for example, indirect majority ownership by a sanctioned entity) as well as their activity-based risk (for example, semiconductor exports to Russia). These insights help law enforcement and the intelligence and defense communities in the US, UK, Australia, and elsewhere investigate financial crime, obtain authoritative data on foreign commercial networks, and ensure national security.
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