‘Crypto-Cleansing:’ Strategies to Fight Digital Currency Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion

Digital currency technologies generated widespread public and investor interest in 2017, with new cryptocurrency products capable of streamlining and decentralizing global commerce. Unfortunately, these technologies also create new money laundering tools that allow countries like Iran, North Korea, and Russia to evade international sanctions. This is especially true of so-called “privacy coins,” which offer personal […]

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Platform Technology in RegTech—Solving the Headache of Stove-Piped Systems and Isolated Data for a Better Risk Mitigation

Patching together stove-piped systems has been a necessary evil in AML compliance and overall enterprise governance, risk, and compliance (eGRC). Institutions regularly wrestle with discrete systems and isolated data that may function well in isolation but cannot inform the crucial larger picture of risk and compliance. Advances in platform technology, however, now make possible game-changing […]

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AML/CTF: How to Measure Senior Management’s Commitment

A review of the recent sanctions imposed on organizations reveals that regulators frequently condemn the lack of governance, oversight, involvement and accountability at the senior levels of organizations with respect to anti-money laundering controls and the financing of terrorist activities. These major deficiencies are believed to be the source of the majority of regulatory deficiencies […]

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Anti-Money Laundering Controls Failing to Detect Terrorists, Cartels, and Sanctioned States

Originally published on www.reuters.com Here.   Regulators are holding financial institutions responsible for the real-life consequences of anti-money laundering (AML) failures. Firms must reconfigure their transaction monitoring programs to identify the emergent, multi-dimensional money laundering and terrorist financing methods that are defeating today’s rules-based detection scenarios. Adopting an actor-centric hybrid threat finance (HTF) model can cut […]

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Attacking Elder Financial Abuse

Recent news of the largest federal crackdown on elder fraud in U.S. history should send a powerful message to financial institutions; prevention of this growing problem is critical, and technology holds the key. Many were surprised by the scale of law-enforcement actions announced Feb. 22, in which more than 250 defendants were charged in schemes […]

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AML, KYC and the Smartphone

Thanks to the prevalence of smartphones (77 percent of U.S. adults now own one), consumers not only have more payment options than ever before, but they also have higher expectations for fast and frictionless transactions. From first enrollment to checkout and payment, consumers demand a seamless and extremely convenient experience. However, meeting these consumer expectations can […]

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Why Banning Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies is Not the Solution

Many government bodies, regulators, investors and banks see Bitcoin, even the whole cryptocurrency market, as a speculative bubble. Some say it is a fraud, while others speculate that it will continue to rise in 2018. Previously, I wrote an article on why I believe that Bitcoin will fail. Not because it is a fraud, but because it […]

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AML Program Effectiveness: Sufficiency of Resources

“Is this us?” When it comes to penalty actions that include insufficient resources, that is one of the first questions the average AML compliance officer should ask after reading some of the more recent enforcement cases, like the one that resulted in an $8 million penalty for Raymond James, or the $16.5 million headache for Credit Suisse. […]

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Regulation 504 and The Evolving Compliance Landscape

On June 30, 2016, the New York State Department of Financial Services (“NYS DFS”) issued the final version Rule 504, “Banking Division Transaction Monitoring and Filtering Program Requirements and Certifications.”  The Rule takes effect on January 1, 2017, with the first reporting date of April 15, 2018.  In a sense, the Rule follows upon the […]

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