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Here’s a mystery: who on Earth is Altia and why does every police force in the UK rely on its FIT software? Fortunately it’s a mystery that you don’t need to be a hardened detective to solve, with the Nottingham-based company celebrating the software’s 20-year anniversary with a trio of good news stories.
“When we first developed the software, we wanted to empower investigators to work smarter, and today, seeing every UK police force depend on FIT [Financial Investigation Toolkit] is incredibly rewarding and we’re looking forward to increasing its use around the world,” said Huw Bristow, Chief Technology Officer at of Altia.
“Its growth has been driven by one simple mission, helping the professionals on the front line uncover the truth faster and with greater confidence.”
Here, then, is a rundown of what FIT is and how it’s helping to solve financial crime in over 24 countries.
Altia says it developed FIT to support financial investigators by making their task easier. As a first step, that could mean converting electronic and paper-based information into a digital form that can be analysed easily.
It doesn’t have to data owned by a police force. When the Calgary Police Service needed help with a money-laundering scam, it used FIT to analyse every disclosure made by financial institutions.
The Calgary team then used FIT’s Pattern Manager to spot repeated behaviours that gave away the criminal operations, and then used the “Merge accounts” feature to combine accounts they suspected related to the same individual.
“Due to the increasing complexity of financial crimes, our investigations related to organised crime pose the biggest challenge of getting the right balance of resources – people and technology – so we can conduct the best possible investigation,” said Geoff McLaughlin, Detective, Calgary Police in the company’s case study.
“By using Altia Financial Investigation Toolkit, we’ve been able to significantly reduce manual data entry, and conduct analysis rapidly with confidence, knowing it meets evidential standards.”
It isn’t just police forces where FIT has come to the rescue. In 2023, 148,000 social housing homes in England were subject to tenancy fraud. In London alone, the cost to the public came to around £155 million.
In this case, Altia’s FIT “automated the process of finding links in financial data to demonstrate the need for further information and an interview under caution” said a representative of the South West London Fraud Partnership (SWLFP) in the case study.
The spokesperson added: “We’ve even been able to expand this work beyond tenancy fraud. One case that has been a particular success is where the analysis through the Toolkit and quick reports showed a pattern of a carer withdrawing and transferring funds to his account from the person he was charged with caring for.
“We are now hoping to use the output reports generated for cases where prosecution is being considered.”
Altia’s software has also been used by Peru’s Ministeria Publico to speed up financial investigations and in Australia, where “it helped a government-backed organisation uncover the crimes of a financial administrator who defrauded a vulnerable woman out of more than $170K”, according to Altia.
