Articles and White Papers

The goal of Compliance is to keep a firm out of regulatory trouble. And believe it or not, it’s not all glitz and glamor. Sometimes we need to get our point across to different areas of an organization. It requires us to use our influence and persuasion skills. These skills are key.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. I have been in compliance training for a better part of my career. I learned at an early point in my career that you have to make training impactful, memorable, and digestible. Compliance training was simply something to tick the box and can be limited in duration as possible. I understood. Employees do not want to take time off their busy schedule to learn something new or some type of refresher training.

In a world where financial crimes grow more sophisticated by the day, the advent of Artificial Intelligence has enhanced the capabilities of financial institutions to better manage the risks. With its ability to uncover intricate patterns in millions of transactions, AI is elevating compliance into a proactive force against financial crime.

Money launderers / illicit actors despite their best efforts often leave trails - an anomalous transaction that doesn’t quite add up, a discrepant document or information that holds little significance, or a transactional behavior that often go unnoticed, draws suspicions to a financial crime investigator with a subtle glance. Detective or Investigator, in fiction or real, often reminds us that clue / lead is always there; ready to be uncovered by those who can see beyond the surface

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024, misinformation and disinformation is ranked as the top threat the world will likely to face within the next two years. Deepfake related crimes has recently spiked which caught attention of global financial institutions and regulators across the world.

As we stepped into the year 2025, we perhaps have already perceived the emerging risks and priorities for 2025. The landscape of compliance risks already started to evolve at an accelerated pace which must be checked and balanced for sustainability of the organizations.

Cryptocurrencies certainly opened up new opportunities for transactions, investments, and innovation. High risk financial institutions can significantly be benefitted from it and scale themselves. However, cryptocurrencies also possess significant challenges to financial crime, regulatory compliance, and various operational risks.

Part of the Early Career Professional Series

In March, April, and May 2025, headlines highlighted a reduced compliance burden for financial institutions through either law rescissions or eased enforcement.

Concurrent with those messages were messages about the importance of treating service members fairly. Thus, it seems like a suitable time to review some important provisions about the SCRA (Servicemembers Civil Relief Act), and controls needed to maintain compliance with those provisions.

Part of the Early Career Professional Series

Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) are important topics at every institution, but even more so at an institution that banks higher risk business customers. Questions on this topic come up constantly during the Q&A segment of webinars and during other training sessions. Part of what leads to confusion about CDD and EDD is that collecting information about business customers (the ‘what’) must be risk-based – based upon the risk of a customer engaging in money laundering or terrorist financing. And even after an institution has figured out the ‘what’ of CDD and EDD, they must still figure out the ‘how’ and ‘in what manner.’