FRANKLIN, Tennessee, USA-The spies are infiltrating Wall Street. Several companies linked to the intelligence community are gaining clients in the world of finance, as banks and hedge funds flock to counterterrorism tools to detect misconduct of its employees before they result in fines or worse.
“Both Wall Street and the intelligence world want the same thing: finding unknown unknowns in the data,” says Roger Hockenberry, former chief technology officer of the secret services of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, for its acronym in ) and now a partner at consultancy Cognitio Corp., Washington. . “The terrorists do not seek financial firms, but good clients and attempted fraud,” says
The CIA gave many of these companies his big break: after the terrorist attacks of 2001, a division of private equity agency known as In-Q-Tel began to seed companies that help analyze large amounts of data to quickly identify threats financing. These skills have become more valuable as Wall Street tries to keep at bay dishonest brokers in increasingly complex markets and moving at high speed.
In recent years, 101 companies They received funding from In-Q-Tel, 33 customers have achieved on Wall Street, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. A spokeswoman for In-Q-Tel declined to comment
Other companies in this field include Palantir Technologies Inc., which helps governments and Wall Street firms to analyze their data.; Recorded Future Inc., which monitors Internet for threats to cybersecurity and other events; and Domino Data Labs Inc., which provides the plumbing for firms doing data analytics.
A few days ago Palantir grossed $ 450 million at a valuation of around US $ 20,000 million. Since 2009, he has received more than US $ 215 million in contracts from the FBI, the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security United States, according USAspending.gov, a government site that publishes these figures. The firm, which began working with intelligence agencies, says that now 60% of its business comes from commercial customers, particularly on Wall Street.
Another small company, Digital Reasoning Systems Inc. of Tennessee It has counted among its clients the UBS Group AG, the firm hedge fund Point72 Asset Management LLP and Credit Suisse Group AG, who have used software to analyze data that has served the US government to track enemies state.
Tim Estes founded the firm in 2000 became Digital Reasoning during his senior year at the University of Virginia, where he studied philosophy. Conceived as a specialist in “machine learning” company, a branch of computer-centered programs that can learn from the data and make better decisions, Digital Reasoning suffered during its first two years.
However, day in 2002, Estes got a meeting in a nearby army base. There, he demonstrated an early version of a software product that became known as Synthesys, who could read large amounts of text and extract patterns and no apparent links to the eye humano.Eso led to a pilot project and an initial contract with the government in 2004. The system was integrated into the US Army and was used on the battlefield in Afghanistan, as Digital Reasoning. An investment in 2011 of In-Q-Tel precipitated major contracts to sign a broader range of agencies, including the CIA.
Located in a block of office buildings on the outskirts of Franklin, Tennessee The firm has about 100 employees, including more than 30 employees are authorized to deal with highly sensitive security issues. Former Wall Street researchers and young techies come in and out of conference-based sites of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings names.
“We consider ourselves as the result of Darwinian billions dollars in intelligence spending after the attacks of September 11, “said Estes, 36.
The work you do for the government Digital Reasoning is confidential, but Estes said to include things like” decipher the alias of certain persons who were hard to find in the data. “
Last year, Digital Reasoning raised $ 24 million from a group of banks led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse. So far, he has announced contracts to assist compliance teams of UBS and Point72, signing US $ 11,000 million led by Steven A. Cohen and was formerly known as SAC Capital.
Point72 use Digital Reasoning Systems in conjunction with Palantir to monitor every week about one million e-mails, instant messages and other electronic communications, according to Vincent Tortorella, director of compliance and monitoring of the company.
The systems of the two companies help alert and award a degree of risk to the e-mails, which are then reviewed by a compliance group formed by former employees of the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Commission Securities and Exchange US, says Tortorella.
When you offer your services to potential customers, Digital Reasoning usually do a demonstration of how the system responded when he received 500,000 e-mails related to the scandal Enron provided by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission US The Synthesys system reads all text files in a database, captures metadata and creates bonds between people and institutions. The words are scored feeling to help detect emotion. The end result is an application that can be used to look at the data from many perspectives.
Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this article. .
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