Crosshatching privacy: Financial intermediaries’ data practices between law enforcement and data economy

Financial data are key to various law enforcement processes, including criminal investiga-tions, anti-money laundering strategies and the implementation of national fiscal policies. However, financial data also qualify as personal data. While law enforcement objectives can derogate certain privacy-related legal safeguards, private financial firms should, in princi-ple, comply with the privacy standards upheld by GDPR. Highlighting the most critical trends of the current financial industry (i.e. commercial exploitation of data; international dimen-sion of financial informational networks; use of automated processing and decision-making tools), the present paper analyses how privacy and law enforcement priorities interplay in determining the governance of financial data. We conclude by recognizing that privacy loop-holes exist in the current financial industry’s data practices, and that-as payments tend to be increasingly performed in digital manners, exponentially increasing the availability of financial data-privacy-enhancing payment methods should be encouraged and legitimised.