- 05/01/2024
The Curious Crime Fighter: How WorkFusion’s Art Mueller stays ahead in the ever-changing world of financial crime compliance, a tale of tenacity, triumph
The skinny:
- If you ask Art Mueller what's the most important attribute for succeeding in the world of financial crime prevention, he'll tell you curiosity.
- This insatiable drive to uncover what others have tried to hide has been the driving force behind Mueller’s more than 20-year career chasing after ostensibly all forms of financial crime, including money laundering, fraud, sanctions scofflaws and illicit finance across multiple major global banks.
- After top compliance roles at financial sector powerhouses like Rabobank, Commerzbank, UBS, and American Express, Mueller has brought his coveted experience to a new frontier – artificial intelligence.
- As VP, Financial Crime, Banking and Financial Services at AI compliance pioneer, WorkFusion, he's helping banks and fintechs deploy machine learning to supercharge their compliance programs.
- In a time of historic disruption and uncertainty in the fincrime compliance field – similar to going from manual reviews to automated alerts – Mueller also sees opportunity, going from a focus on rote tasks to rewriting the book on bridging the divide between rules and results to better stop illicit threat actors.
By Brian Monroe
VP of Content, ACFCS
May 1, 2024
If you ask Art Mueller what's the most important attribute for succeeding in the world of financial crime prevention, he'll tell you curiosity.
"A drive to keep digging and understand what is going on and why," is how the battle-hardened investigations veteran puts it.
This insatiable drive to uncover what others have tried to hide has been the driving force behind Mueller’s more than 20-year career chasing after ostensibly all forms of financial crime, including money laundering, fraud, sanctions scofflaws and illicit finance across multiple major global banks.
It's a career trajectory that almost reads like an action-packed whodunit thriller – adapting and adjusting to a world torn asunder by terror attacks and trying to remake a compliance and investigations regime to ensure something like that can never happen again.
Mueller cut his teeth in the high-stakes world of financial crimes while at American Express in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, helping with the implementation of the country’s retooled countercrime rules, reshaped and renewed as part of the USA Patriot Act.
From there he went on to run investigations groups for banking giants like UBS and Commerzbank, working his way up to top anti-money laundering (AML) leadership roles.
His resume is a testament to tenacity and rising to conquer ever-more complex challenges in the field, with stints leading AML, transaction monitoring, investigations and sanctions units – areas under increasing law enforcement and regulatory scrutiny in recent years.
But he never backed down.
“I loved doing investigations, trying to find the bad actors and unravel their schemes." Mueller said.
More than just mental gymnastics, this work had a purpose that inspired him, particularly with acknowledgement from an ardent ally.
"It was very rewarding, especially when law enforcement would tell us a report we filed really helped with a case," he said.
The duality of disruption: uncertainty, but also opportunity
After top compliance roles at financial sector powerhouses like Rabobank, Mueller has brought his coveted experience to a new frontier – artificial intelligence.
As Vice President, Financial Crime, Banking and Financial Services at AI compliance pioneer, WorkFusion, he's helping banks and fintechs deploy machine learning and automation to supercharge their compliance programs.
His tacit goal?
Shift analysts away from the time-sucking and morale-draining tasks of vaulting over tedious data hurdles toward higher-level risk analysis – which can create more valuable and fruitful cases for law enforcement, the eventual customer of financial sector compliance efforts.
"The old ways of fighting financial crime just aren't working anymore," Mueller said. "We need to get smarter and start leveraging technologies like AI to turn the tables."
In that axiom, he speaks from hard-earned wisdom, having witnessed firsthand how technological disruption can transform an industry.
He witnessed the leap from human eyes and the speed of singular human minds reviewing names on lists to the power of automated systems analyzing transactions at the speed of global commerce.
"I'm old enough to remember manually reviewing client lists against PDFs of the sanctions watchlist," Mueller said.
He chuckles in retrospect at how revolutionary it seemed when the first transaction monitoring and sanctions screening systems automated those processes with rules-based and fuzzy logic-based alerts.
Now, AI is poised to spark another tectonic change in the fincrime compliance sector by training machines to automatically triage alerts, interpret data and identify suspicious patterns – ideally presenting effective, ready-made cases to human decision-makers.
While the underlying technologies have evolved light years since the early days, Mueller’s approach has remained constant – stay curious and courageous.
"If something doesn't seem right, keep digging until you understand what's happening," he said.
This mindset was reinforced by great mentors like Vaughn Swartz at Rabobank, currently the institution’s Chief Compliance Officer for North America, who showed him the value of asking the tough "why" questions.
AI is a tool, not an answer: don’t forget power of fincrime fundamentals
It's that same spirit of incessant inquiry that Mueller aims to instill in the next generation of financial crime professionals.
His advice for them to succeed in a roiling world of AI, uncertainty and rapidly-advancing technology?
"Don't just check boxes – understand how all the pieces fit together," Mueller said, advocating for future fincrime fighters to not shirk on the tried-and-true basics of data accuracy at the front end of a customer or corporate relationship.
He encourages gaining cross-training in bedrock concepts, such as know-your-customer compliance, transaction monitoring, risk assessments and the at-times esoteric and confounding software running it all.
"Getting exposure to different areas pushes you to really comprehend what an effective program looks like end-to-end," Mueller said.
Wise words indeed as he is cognizant that the compliance champion of today must be part data scientist, part AI oracle, part charismatic pragmatist and relentless optimist – both to inspire your team now and have the communal fortitude needed to tackle unforeseen challenges on the horizon.
As for what drives Mueller to stay endlessly curious all these years later?
"First and foremost, my family," he said.
Being a role model for his children and creating a better future for them is his greatest motivation.
But he also finds inspiration in admirable leaders like Winston Churchill andAbraham Lincoln., who persevered through adversity seemingly beyond human endurance.
"Their stories remind me to treat everyone with basic human dignity – or as I simply put it, be respectful of all those around you."
Looking a bit at the crystal ball for a glimpse into his own future, Mueller has found the perfect fit for his practical skills and sage knowledge at WorkFusion, channeling that dogged spirit into shaping AI tools that can help investigators work smarter, not harder.
As the landscape shifts and new schemes constantly emerge, Mueller and his team will remain always probing, always digging, until he gets those answers.
He was kind enough to share some of his insight in our latest ACFCS Member Spotlight:
Who inspires you?
First, I would say my family. They make all the hard work worthwhile as well as striving to be the best role model I can be for my children.
Second, I also look to leaders in history who have persevered in the face of great adversity, people such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr. ad Abraham Lincoln.
What do you do in your current role?
I co-head Financial Crime at WorkFusion with a great colleague, Grant Vickers. We both bring financial crime subject matter expertise to WorkFusion, our products, and our clients.
We help drive and shape our Financial Crime suite of AI products as well as discussions with clients.
What does your career trajectory in financial crime look like?
Well, I’ve had a number of positions over the 20-plus years I’ve spent in the financial crime industry.
Starting with American Express where I cut my teeth in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act.
I followed with a nine-year stint at UBS Americas where my last position there was Regional Head of Investigations. Then I really had some fun at Commerzbank’s NY Branch Office as Deputy Head of AML and Head of Transaction Monitoring.
I also spent more than six years as the BSA/AML and Sanctions Officer for Rabobank North America.
I would also love to mention that I had some great mentors in these 20 plus years including but not limited to Vaughn Swartz at Rabobank and Mike Bixon at UBS.
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Quite simply, don’t be a jerk. Always try to treat people and colleagues respectfully and cordially. Treat them as you would be treated.
What would you say are the most important attributes for someone in your role to succeed?
Curiosity. A drive to keep digging and to understand what is going on and why.
Earlier in my career this was focused on investigations. If something didn’t seem quite right, keep digging. Keep asking questions. Keep going until you get to the answer. This served me well later in senior positions to better understand people, processes and technology.
It also helped in how I implemented and randeployed FinCrime programs. I needed to understand these things to explain what we were doing within the program to senior management, audit, and regulators.
How has (compliance, investigations, etc.) changed and evolved during your career?
I can say that I’m old enough to remember manually reviewing client lists against pdfs of the [Specially Designated Nationals (SDN)] list. I saw the first wave of monitoring and screening applications to automate alerts.
This was a game changer 20-25 years ago. I’m seeing a similar sea change with the advent and use of AI and machine learning in
FinCrime programs.
Moving away from the rote, manual work by using AI and machine learning to work alerts, gather information and documentation, review and draw links in large amounts of data, and allowing analysts to be analysts and risk managers and mitigators as opposed to hunter-gatherers.
What do you see as the key challenges related to financial crime in the sector overall?
First, I would say the potential of a next black swan event similar to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This significantly strained FinCrime programs with large increases in sanctions and transaction monitoring alerts, as well as lots of detective work to draw links between sanctioned persons to customers and transactions.
Second, is the enormous amount of manual work and false positives that still exist within FinCrime programs.
From onboarding to periodic reviews to risk assessments and transaction monitoring to sanctions alerts and quality control, most of the work is still very manual and more focused on documentation than risk management and mitigation.
In both, I’m a huge proponent of AI and Machine Learning to address these challenges. The same old same old has not worked very well over the past twenty years.
What motivated you to become a financial crime professional?
First, I found it incredibly interesting and exciting. I loved doing investigations. Trying to find the bad actors. Trying to unravel the scheme.
Second, I wanted to make a difference and felt like I’ve done that throughout my career.
Whether it is identifying a potential money laundering scheme or investment fraud, it was very rewarding, especially when we’d have follow ups with law enforcement who told us that a [suspicious activity report (SAR)] we filed was very useful in their investigation.
Is there anything that surprised you about your current role?
Well, moving from being within FinCrime programs to now being part of a vendor selling to financial institutions has been a bit of a shock, especially going from large, global institutions to a much smaller organization!
What is the most rewarding part of your job?
Knowing that we are helping FinCrime programs across a number of financial institutions, and not impacting just one.
I love talking to clients about the current state of their programs and how we can help. How we can bring AI and ML into their programs, shifting their analysts from hunter-gatherers to true risk managers and mitigators.
For professionals with 5-10 years of experience, what advice would you give to help them rise in their careers to the next level?
Do different things in FinCrime programs and Operations. Understand KYC. Understand Transaction Monitoring. Understand the technology deployed. Get experience in doing different things.
This will push you to understand how a FinCrime program works and what an effective one looks like.