The neutrino factory is a facility for future precision studies of neutrino oscillations. A so-called near detector is essential for reaching the required precision for a neutrino oscillation analysis. The main task of the near detector is to measure the flux of the neutrino beam. Such a high intensity neutrino source like a neutrino factory provides also the opportunity for precision studies of various neutrino interaction processes in the near detector. We discuss the design concepts of such a detector. Results of simulations of a high resolution scintillating fiber tracker show that such a detector is capable of determining the neutrino flux normalization with an uncertainty of less than 1% by measuring pure leptonic interactions. Reconstruction of the neutrino energy in each event and a flux estimation based on the shapes of the neutrino energy spectra are discussed. A full setup of the near detector, consisting of a high granularity vertex detector, high resolution tracker, and muon catcher is also presented. Finally, a method to extrapolate the measured near detector flux to the far detector is shown, demonstrating that it is able to extract the correct values of θ13 and the CP violation phase δ without any significant bias and with high accuracy.