How to increase the efficiency of your financial research (FINANCIAL INTELLIGENCE)

How to increase the efficiency of your financial research?

We all get confused with some of the areas of financial research such as where to begin, what type of information is relevant, will that information be reliable or not, and lot of things come into our mind when we conduct financial research or investigation.

Well here are some of the techniques which can help you conduct an efficient financial research and investigation:

1)DATA GATHERING: There are lot of platform available which can provide information about the company but some of them may not be reliable, some of the reliable tools which can help you gather information about the company are :

a)Lexis Nexius b)opencorporates c)fincen msb database d)GCRD and so on , there are different ways of collecting information about the company but due to GDPR it is considered to be unethical even if you are conducting a financial investigation about the company's also

2)INFORMATION: Once you have the relevant information, you need to convert the data into information, which can be done in many ways one of them are sort and arranging also called as data processing and cleansing. Tools you can use are Python, R and so on, for non technical people you can use automated tools such as IBM WATSON, H2O and so on.

3)KNOWLEDGE: Once you get all the information ,try to explore it further in following ways:

a)Visualization- One of the best ways to get a clear idea about the information you have is through visualization techniques, best ways to do is using Network analysis to find out the hidden link between/among nodes.

b)Analysis-This phase is consider to be very crucial as it take lots of research and analytical skills to conduct and efficient research or investigation. In recent one case an investment bank XXXXXXXX was indulge in financial fraud and the fraud was detected using scanning tools(Confidential), some of the tools which you can use are- RECON-NG, FINALRECON, RECON-T. You can also use spider or crawler to extract information but be cautious these information can be use to bring done any business, so the motive behind such investigation is also important.One of my work profile include intelligence analyst for a startup company where they were using my skills for two purpose :

i)Threat Intelligence (Competitive Advantage) ii)Actionable Intelligence (Cut down Competition). An example for you suppose you want to know what type technology your competitors use also called technology profiling can be accomplished with extension called as Built with.

Another great example is suppose you want to know how your competitors is able to earn so much profit and goodwill in the market, then you can also accomplished such task with above mentioned tools, there are other ways of doing it which will not only reveal their strategy but also their core strength and weakness which is consider to be vulnerable point, moving on.

Let me highlight one more thing one of the case in which during the inital days XXX company was in growing stage so they were focusing more on expansion and not about integrity which land the XXX company in vulnerable position, many of there core information was leaking from their website, what they did was they forget to take down their first website which was accessible by technique called as GOBACKINTIME.

C)interpretation: Once you had the idea about what is going on it becomes your responsibility to forward it to rest of the user and let them decide how these information can be useful to them .

4)INTELLIGENCE: Intelligence is something which can't be explained in simple words. In sort what i would like to say is knowledge when impactful can be called as Intelligence.

List of the tools for my Finance folks:

RADAR SEC-EDGAR ALEPH-OCCRP

FIU (INTEL UNIT) BLOOMBERG DOWJONES-FACTIVA

BAFIN BASEL STAR STOLEN ASSET

FATF WIKILEAKS WALLET-ARMORY

BIC-SEARCH IBAN-VALIDATOR SIX-SWISS-EXCHANGE

ICIJ-OFFSHORE-LEAKS OCCRP-REPORTS T-RANK

GREY-LIST GCRD SEC-EDGAR

NFA-FUTURES GENIOS NORTHDATA