Coaf Cloud — Brazil's Financial Intelligence Unit Plans to Add AI as Suspicious-Activity Filings Keep Climbing

Brazil's Conselho de Controle de Atividades Financeiras (Coaf), the country's financial intelligence unit, receives an average of about 7.5 million communications a year from banks and other obligated entities, of which only around 2% are classified as atypical. From this flow, Coaf produced 18,762 Financial Intelligence Reports (RIFs) in 2024 for use by police and prosecutors, while the number of suspicious-operation communications it received reached 2,566,713 that year — a 766.6% increase over the 296,183 recorded in 2015, according to Brazilian press analysis of Coaf's own data.

To keep up with this growth, Coaf — under the National Public Security Secretariat and in cooperation with the Central Bank — is migrating its systems to a cloud environment, "Coaf Cloud", for greater interoperability, and is being reinforced with analysts on loan from state governments. From 2026 it plans to add artificial intelligence to the pipeline, aiming to improve pattern and anomaly identification, automate cross-referencing of data from banks, fintechs, public bodies and private data providers, and speed up the production of qualified RIFs.

As of the sources reviewed (October 2025 and subsequent reporting), specific ethical guidelines for the algorithmic monitoring of transactions were still under discussion, intended to align Brazil's approach with Financial Action Task Force (FATF/GAFI) recommendations. The 2024 figures above describe Coaf's largely human-driven process before the AI system's planned 2026 launch; no independently evaluated results attributable to the AI component itself are yet available.