J Nicholas Hourigan

Nick Hourigan has over 20 years’ experience working on some of the largest investigations in recent history. He specializes in large volume, typically transaction-based, analytics for the financial services and other industries in litigation and investigation matters.

Nick has extensive experience in managing complex global-scale projects with record sets in the billions. His firm view is that the highest use of analytics is the elevation of expertise, and so his teams work in close collaboration with counsel, client and other FTI Consulting experts to ensure effective and efficient achievement of project objectives. Nick is an expert in developing innovative technical solutions to financial markets analyses which have been accepted by various regulatory authorities. Nick champions development of FTI Consulting’s Augmented Investigations® offering, whereby traditional analytics are complemented by data science and statistical methods in those – and, importantly, only those – situations where this coupling is to maximize client benefit.

On the highly publicized Swedbank matter, Nick led FTI Consulting’s global team of financial crime experts, investigations specialists, data analysts, and forensic accountants to assist counsel in a review of alleged AML violations and OFAC sanctions breaches. As detailed in Swedbank’s unprecedented public report, FTI Consulting analyzed hundreds of billions in alleged money flows from high-risk non-resident individuals through the Baltics into Europe and beyond. The investigation was broad and intensive, considering tens of millions of customers and commensurate volumes of SWIFT and other payments. FTI Consulting deployed proprietary reference data sets, matching technology, custom review tools (CUDARE) and a library of 21 algorithmic detection scenarios to identify customers and analyze potentially suspicious transactions in bringing this matter toward resolution for his client.

Nick led FTI Consulting’s work in the global investigation into integrity in professional tennis (Tennis IRP Interim Report). Nick acted as a data analytics expert in the complex insolvencies of a Middle Eastern bank and related Cayman entities in the context of a $9.2 billion fraud. His London team performed payments analysis across multiple banking systems and built a sophisticated asset tracing tool using Python to automate FIFO analysis of the ultimate beneficiaries of $500 million in allegedly misappropriated funds. Nick gave oral evidence in the Cayman high court on payment analytics and tracing results.

Nick oversaw the investigation and ongoing outsourced weekly analytics of trading exposures across multiple products for a leading global financial institution with offices in London following a $20 million loss due to the collapse of a trading business.

Nick led the FTI Consulting team supporting counsel in a multi-year OFAC voluntary self-disclosure engagement for a global logistics shipping company. The scope of the review, encompassing data from nearly 100 countries and half as many systems, included analysis of all shipping and payments details for US nexus.

For a German payments processor in regulatory difficulty regarding activities of certain merchants: collection of payments data sent to merchant acquirers and, separately, merchant trust account banking transactions to evaluate the completeness and accuracy of transaction information presented to other financial institutions, particularly in the United States.