Articles

‘Is There a Better Way?’: RUSI’s Tom Keatinge on the Imperfection of the SARs Regime

The suspicious activity reporting regime is in need of a “wholesale revolution” that would allow financial institutions to deliver more actionable intelligence to investigators, according to Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at RUSI. In a recent episode of KYC360’s AML Talk Show,… Read More

The Art of the SAR

If filing a suspicious activity report is more of an art than a science, it should be remembered that not all art is equal. Like a painting hung in a museum, a good SAR must be the product of focus and intention if it’s to engage its intended audience. For… Read More

Author Tom Mueller on Financial Crime in the ‘Age of the Whistleblower’

Don’t accuse whistleblowers of being in it for the money. So says Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, during a recent episode of KYC360’s AML Talk Show hosted by Martin Woods. “The vast majority of whistleblowers that I interviewed, their… Read More

Are Sanctions Cruel?

Sanctions are intended to exert economic pressure on targeted groups of persons and countries to either prevent conducting business as usual or, at the very least, make it more expensive to do so. It is hoped that such impediments will cause sanctioned parties to reconsider their course of action and… Read More

Nordic Noir: Understanding the Swedbank Saga

At times it can seem as if Swedbank’s recent history has been taken from the plot of a Nordic noir novel. There is a procedural bleakness to the Swedish bank’s money laundering scandal and a complexity to it all that does little to resolve the moral ambiguities of institutional malfeasance. Read More

Profit Pressures and Weak Supervision Undermine AML Fight: Jack Blum

Pressure within financial institutions to generate profits and inadequate enforcement by supervisory agencies have undermined nations’ efforts to fight money laundering, according to Jack Blum, a US-based financial crime expert who serves as a senior advisor for the Tax Justice Network. Blum, who recently spoke with RiskScreen CEO Stephen Platt for… Read More

Compliance in Quarantine: KYC360’s Reader Survey

When we asked our readers last week to let us know how things were going amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we received hundreds of survey responses from career professionals working in financial services businesses, government agencies, technology companies, law firms and other AML-related occupations all around the world. The message by… Read More

How Banks Can Detect Money Mules in the Time of COVID-19

With all of the terrible economic news that has followed the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to miss the fact that at least one line of work is welcoming new job seekers: money laundering. As the FBI noted earlier this month, organized crime groups are increasingly turning to so-called “money… Read More

‘Think Like a Bad Guy’: Ex-Undercover Agent Robert Mazur on How to Fight Money Laundering

During his time as an undercover agent investigating Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, Robert Mazur kept two lessons from his training in mind: think like a bad guy, and remember, the bad guys are always smarter than the good guys. Mazur, who recently spoke to RiskScreen CEO Stephen Platt… Read More

Trade Misinvoicing: A Common TBML Typology

Trade is the backbone of the global economy and all of us benefit from the trading of products and services across the continents. Global Trade Atlas (GTA) expected an increase in the real value of global trade in both 2020 and 2021 to respectively 188,70.58 and 197,94.77 USD billion. While… Read More