Salv Publishes New Guidance for Financial Institutions on Safe, Compliant Intelligence Sharing

The document provides clear guidance on when, what, and how institutions can legally share intelligence while meeting their fraud, anti-money laundering (AML), and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) requirements.

The guidance is underpinned by specific EU and UK legal references, and draws on Salv’s experience enabling over 56,000 intelligence exchanges for 118 financial institutions across 14 jurisdictions.

Today, collaboration between institutions relies on slow, manual, and unsuitable channels like email and SWIFT. In some cases, grey-area workarounds such as WhatsApp or Telegram are used.

Delays caused by these methods give criminals the upper hand: vital signals are missed, and stolen funds can be moved before investigators can act.

Regulators are clearing the way

Article 75 of the EU’s new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR) explicitly enables banks and other firms to exchange customer-level, suspicion-based intelligence “where strictly necessary”. National frameworks such as the UK’s Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, proposals under PSD3, and industry precedents like the UK JMLSG guidance all point in the same direction: intelligence sharing is becoming an expected part of financial crime prevention. The forthcoming AMLA rulebook is also expected to embed these principles further at the EU level.

“We’ve spent five years helping institutions share intelligence in a secure, compliant, and structured way,” said Taavi Tamkivi, Co-founder and CEO at Salv. “The crime fighters using it today tell us they couldn’t live without it. Yet across Europe, most are still relying on email, workarounds, or nothing at all. That’s no match for today’s criminals.”

“This guidance distils everything we’ve learned into a practical guide that’s already working in the real world. The legal foundations are there. The tools exist. Ask yourself: what’s really stopping your organisation? And what might you achieve if you start collaborating more effectively?”

While Salv’s insights are underpinned by its experience scaling Salv Bridge, its intelligence-sharing solution, this guidance is designed to act as a standalone framework that identifies laws and regulations that make safe, compliant intelligence sharing possible. It also helps financial crime leaders understand what passes the “strictly necessary” test in Article 75 of AMLR, ensuring only the right data is shared.

“Intelligence Sharing in Financial Crime: A Guide to Safe, Compliant Collaboration,” is available to download on the Salv website.