Using data for smarter border control
How Finnish Customs use
their wide-reaching concerns to positive effect
By Samy Gardemeister, Deputy Head of Enforcement Department and of Strategic Planning
and International Affairs Division at Finnish Customs
Customs is an important operation that not only has far reaching implications for a country, but requires close cooperation between many organisations in order to be truly effective. Day by day, security and issues affecting customs changes unexpectedly, partly in response to global trends, and other times due to current affairs and intelligence.
Whilst no organisation can say it operates in a silo, using that to the benefit of its objectives and operations is no easy
task. In the world of data analytics, that means using data from multiple sources and doing so to positive effect. It can prove to be a crucial aspect of an organisation’s effectiveness and success. For Finnish Customs the effective
use of data is very important, as it helps to avoid silos, which is crucial to the organisation’s working methods.
Not only does Finnish Customs receive input from many organisations but the outcomes of analysis have a far-reaching impact and must be shared beyond the organisation.
Making this a success requires four key factors: producing meaningful, real time insight; being responsive; creating a coordinated approach through lines of communication whether for data in or insight provided; and agility to make sure new goals and briefs can be met quickly.
Finnish Customs, part of the Finnish Ministry of Finance, has responsibilities that lie mainly around trade facilitation,revenue collection and protection of society. Its areas of interest and remit are widespread. It has responsibilities across site reinforcement, broader security and safety issues, organised crime, and terrorism. Its influence is even wider reaching – working with 12 different ministries, it supports and exchanges information between each of the ministries and other bodies such as border control, in order to deliver effective customs operations.
Data from multiple sources is crucial to providing a holistic view for customs enforcement. Depending on the project, there might be a variety of databases available, as well as other sources on a project basis. The sources, and therefore the platform, will vary, depending on the requirements of management or investigators. There will also be projects for
which data is sourced in huge volume. That requires an automated system that can accommodate unstructured data in different forms, or even old data stored on old systems.
Insights and actions
Samy Gardemeister, Deputy Head of EnforcementDep artment and Head of Strategic Planning and International Affairs Division at Finnish Customs, explains: “There is an ongoing level of analysis and insight that must be produced every day, it has to be meaningful insight that management can act upon quickly. For that to happen, we could need any number of different data sources, from publicly available data to other departments in the Finnish government, as well as other governments within the European Union.We have to be able to turn the data into meaningful information quickly, so our officers can focus on the outcomes of the analysis.”
This requirement for readily available insight means data at Finnish Customs has to be treated with a flexible approach, and always with a valuable outcome in mind. Context is crucial to the process because of the changeable nature of security, so Finnish Customs has to be able to act quickly and adjust insight accordingly.
Gardemeister concludes: “Data and analysis is part of the intelligence that any customs operation needs. Risk assessment is of course central to this"
The future of a data-based operation is continuing to expand the scope of data we can use, and improve the way we analyse that data, so we can act quickly and continue to become increasingly responsive in how we use it.
