It is no news at all, that your money travels in channels that properly ID you as an individual. And also it is not a novel bit of info, that financial institutions are required by laws to co-operate in sharing data. Usually in the name of anti-terrorism, anti-extremism, anti-corruption, anti-crime causes. And it is transcending physical borders, well we know that.

But what we did not necessarily, what the depth of this kind of financial intelligence really is. Now it seems, that even the big players use this way to know a bit more of their colleagues. According to a number of sources, “some 250 foreign central banks and governments keep $3.3 trillion of their assets at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about half of the world’s official dollar reserves”. Their account holdings and transactions are tell-tale, and is used as yet another option to build large databases, mine them, build large datasets for machine learning and at the end of the line – to operate an AI that is being fed by these patterns.

Anyone felt otherwise? The magnitudes are changing and the storage capacity and computational power is increasing, but the basic interests remain the same.

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/article/fed-accounts-intelligence/how-the-federal-reserve-serves-u-s-foreign-intelligence-idUSL1N1JN1HD

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-accused-russian-agent-butina-met-u-treasury-100302560.html?guccounter=1

https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg264.aspx