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Join the Elite FinCrime Fighting Community
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For Pamela Clegg, Vice President, Crypto Investigations and Risk at blockchain analytics pioneer Ciphertrace, the answer to that age-old question of am I making a difference came during a case when the tools, expertise and financial crime instinct she had crafted for more than a decade came together to help rescue a young girl being trafficked.
Uri Rivner, the Co-Founder and CEO of Refine Intelligence, has been an innovator, startup founder and online payments fraud-fighting pioneer for more than two decades.
With more than 30 years of experience in the field of financial crime and compliance, tuning the systems and empowering the human professionals running them, Ruud Grotens said inspiration for him comes from a powerful concept: that will can overcome adversity.
For Rabihah Butler, getting into the compliance field wasn’t an accident or aberration, simply falling into it because it was an upgrade from her current position. It also wasn’t an easy fallback – such as someone coming from a background as a regulator or government investigator.
While maybe not aware of it at the time several years ago, learning how to digitize, capture and upgrade ownership registries in Macedonia set Ljubinka Slaveska on a path to tackling one of the biggest financial crime challenges of the modern era: shell companies and, more broadly, the seedy world of corporate secrecy.
Dalit Amitai knows that criminals, whether they are cyber hackers, fraudsters or money launderers, are infinitely creative – always looking for a way to breach systems, steal from customers or cleanse sullied funds through an institution.
For Jessica Abell, the irony doesn’t escape her that her career thus far has been a quest to answer the question: are certain actions, transactions and reactions to geopolitical power dynamics by a given entity a threat to national security.
For Vikas Agarwal, even decades ago, he seemed predestined to become a fincrime fighter and compliance champion – even though he didn’t know it yet. But looking back, there were early signs. A gift with numbers. At ease with deconstructing data. Being able to pull back and see what it all means.
NICE Actimize’s Adam McLaughlin, a self-proclaimed “adrenaline junkie,” is just as comfortable throwing himself headlong into the abyss – and the unknown – in the real world as he is leaping into the cavernous maw of a beastly compliance technology challenge in a virtual realm.
Dharm Patel’s career has been mainly focused on the challenges of better capturing, analyzing and wielding data, first to stop fraudsters and scammers and more recently, to buttress anti-money laundering compliance.
Stelios Tachtatzis is one of the rare figures in the financial crime and compliance space who has taken a truly expansive and convergent mindset to strengthen compliance and fight financial crime.
When Craig Fetterman finally got a chance to manage others in the compliance field, he made sure not to let it go to his head. Rather than trying to institute an authoritarian regime, he took a decidedly different tack, guided by a simple but powerful philosophy: “Treat people who work for you as if they were your boss.”
James “Jim” Dinkins has made a career out of fighting financial crime in all of its forms over more than 30 years – at the forefront of the intersection of national security, border security, organized crime, narco trafficking, global trade and terrorist financing.
Rajaram Vadapandeshwara has been at the vanguard of designing software to empower banks to better fight financial crime over the past two decades, tasked with adapting and overcoming criminal groups using ever more exotic schemes and sophisticated technologies to evade detection.
Early in Deleep Nair’s career, he confided to a mentor that he felt a “bit intimidated” and wondered whether he could compete in such a crowded field when his competitors could easily impress recruiters and target employment firms with just a word: Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
For Katie Conroy, fincrime compliance problem solving is more than just analyzing rules, ruminating on regulations, digesting data and settling on a defensible risk plateau. It’s about the history of human problem solving itself: anthropology to amplify strategy.
With the acceleration of payments and digital finance, financial services are speeding up, but fraudsters are keeping the pace. As financial institutions grapple with faster fraud, slow-moving and manual investigative processes and a lack of real-time data are key sticking points. Are fraud case management systems moving at the speed of fraud?
Adoption of mobile banking was already accelerating prior to the pandemic, but the disruption emerging from the onset of COVID-19 has put the pedal to the metal. For younger generations, mobile-first banking is increasingly the norm, with Gen-Z favoring the mobile channel at 56%.
Some try to navigate life without being accountable for a decision. Yet decision-making – about customers, transactions, and behaviors – is at the heart of the risk-based approach, and financial crime compliance professionals are asked to make dozens or hundreds of decisions a day.
In this monthly wrap-up, we took a look at the surging sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine and the historic, global response by the U.S., Europe, United Kingdom and other countries, along with other virtual value enforcement and oversight trends.
Why detect and prevent financial crime? It may seem like a self-evident question, but it’s one with many possible answers. There’s an obvious response – because the law requires it – but there are other compelling answers too.
In ACFCS’s Emerging Risks series, we sit down with Ross Delston attorney and expert witness, to shed light on the issues that have NOT been widely discussed in regard to Russia and the global financial industry, to include geographic, credit, and operational risk.
The Biden Administration on Wednesday issued a long-awaited executive order charting the course of virtual value oversight, regulatory approaches and implementation in the United States – a seminal initiative with a host of tethers to the global fight against financial crime in the fiat and digital worlds.
After weeks of bluster and saber rattling – and ignoring a cacophony of threats, formal sanctions and condemnations from world leaders – Russia invaded Ukraine Thursday, causing shockwaves in geopolitical, energy and finance markets.
From the financial flows behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the modern focus on state-sponsored cybercrime, financial crime has become inextricably linked to national security over the last 20 years.
The U.S. Treasury has released its long-awaited final rule on capturing key beneficial ownership details on certain companies, a move to address one of the country’s largest and longstanding financial crime vulnerabilities and the vehicle of choice for the worst criminals on the planet to move their illicit hauls.
For many financial institutions, the dream of a single unit to combat financial crime – a team that would combine expertise, data and intelligence across departments and compliance functions – has become a reality.
ACFCS is offering ten (10) complimentary CFCS certification packages to cyber-enabled crime fighters - fincrime professionals who have stepped forward to confront the epidemic of cybercrime and cyber-enabled fraud wrought by the pandemic.
The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has led to historic disruption in business, finance, and daily life. Yet financial crime has hardly slowed down, and the confusion engendered by COVID-19 has been ripe breeding ground for fraudsters, cyberattacks and scammers.
One of the winners of the ACFCS certification scholarship for fincrime professionals fighting human trafficking shares what drives her in this mission to thwart criminal groups through follow-the-money sleuthing and directly helping victims and survivors rebuild one-on-one.
Facing conflict with North Korea and Iran, tension with Russia, and threats from transnational organized crime, governments around the world have increasingly relied on the same policy tool: sanctions. The result is a complex, high-stakes outlook for sanctions compliance.
Amr Rashed deeply understands the duality of the nascent but burgeoning cryptocurrency sector.
In the financial crime arena, few topics have generated as much concern and confusion in recent years as cryptocurrencies.
Festus Aisagbonhi knows that one of the greatest allies for criminals is when people – whether they are compliance professionals, investigators and even potential victims – don’t even understand the crime, or know the underlying human and financial red flags.
Trying to counter a crime as complex and nuanced as human trafficking – with criminal networks in recent years more aggressively weaving transactions in crypto coins and dispersing them through seemingly unconnected credit and prepaid cards and bank accounts – is a team effort, says Rosie McWhorter.
For Joseph Scaramucci, taking down criminals, following the money and saving victims is why he got into law enforcement in the first place more than 15 years ago – a calling that has in recent years become a mission to tackle the soaring scourge of human trafficking and change the focus of investigations from prosecuting victims to protecting them.