In this episode of Fridays with Fintelekt, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt is in conversation with Alia Mahmud, Global Regulatory Affairs Specialist, ComplyAdvantage.

Alia shares her opinion about the challenges compliance professionals face on a day-to-day basis, and on top of the list are the need for a robust governance framework and a strong second line of defense. She covers how metaverse has proved to be an exciting innovation, but comes with it’s own set of challenges, risks, and new money laundering and fraud typologies.

She then talks about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Crimes, and how they have become one of the most destructive, lucrative and fast growing crimes. The conversation includes identifiers / risk indicators that can be added to transaction monitoring systems, so that these crimes can be detected and caught by financial institutions.

Alia stresses on how technology can be used to improve the quality of reporting by financial institutions, which is one of the biggest challenges faced by regulators globally.

In this week’s Fridays with Fintelekt episode, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services is in conversation with Robin Lee, Head of APAC, Napier.

The conversation begins with Robin’s career path that has led to his current position at Napier, and how his experience has given him insights into the key issues faced by compliance officers in the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) industry.

Robin highlights the important role technology plays in improving quality of reporting, keeping bad actors from misusing the financial system, and making financial institutions more compliant.

He speaks about factors that make a financial institution’s AML compliance programme more effective, including regulatory expectations, approach of the financial institution, quality of technology and the technology team, and education of all employees.

The conversation ends with the outlook for 2023 for AML technology deployment.

Listen to the entire episode for more interesting insights!

In this episode of Fridays with Fintelekt, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt is in conversation with Maria Nizzero, Research Fellow, Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies, Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) about RUSI’s latest research on the Illicit Finance Threat to Democracies.

The research, primarily based on the transatlantic response to illicit finance, proposes 7 straightforward action items based on 3 underlying principles. The action items have universal applicability and hence the research can be valuable for policy makers across the world.

In this new season of Fridays with Fintelekt, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services is in conversation with Lakshmi Kumar, Director of Policy at Global Financial Integrity, Washington and Mark Nuttall, Director of Risk for APAC and MENA at Thomson Reuters, Singapore.

The conversation revolved around the changing structure of supply chains due to various recent geo-political incidents, how these changes are affecting global trade, the consequence on the money laundering and terrorist financing risks, and therefore how regulators, banks and financial institutions should prepare.

On Fridays with Fintelekt today, Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services hosts Chrisol Correia, Financial Crime Compliance Consultant based in London.

In his career spanning two decades, Chrisol has witnessed the evolution of the financial crime compliance function in terms of capability, resources, scale, infrastructure and culture and towards a broader understanding that good compliance is a business enabler and not a blocker.

In the episode, Chrisol speaks on a variety of issues such as the benefits of technology for smaller institutions, regulatory expectations around risks and controls, collaborative analytics and information sharing.

He finds it encouraging that regulators are now embracing technology and are in a much better position to provide guidance to financial institutions on how technology and automation should be deployed.

He also feels that the next phase in the industry’s future will be around inter-institutional collaboration for multi-directional informational sharing about risks and typologies and a single view of risk across a particular ecosystem.

A milestone is reached for Fridays with Fintelekt today as Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt hosts his 50th guest Tadeo Jun Claravall, Founder, The Financial Crimes, and a student and teacher of financial crime risk and compliance.

More about the book here: www.thefinancialcrimes.com/book

On Fridays with Fintelekt today, hear from Peter Piatetsky, Co-Founder and CEO, Castellum.AI as he provides his expert comments and analysis on the global sanctions regime, with host Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt.

Sanctions have evolved over the years from the level of countries to individuals to sectors. They been used for a variety of reasons from political to counter-terrorism, law enforcement, corruption and human rights. Peter believes that sanctions can be used as a very successful tool if there is a specific goal. The broader that goal, the more difficult it is to achieve via sanctions.

On Fridays with Fintelekt this week, host Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt is joined by Ross Delston, Expert witness, attorney & former US banking regulator (FDIC), who shares his varied experiences in policy responses to trade-based money laundering and trade-based terrorist financing, anti-corruption, corporate transparency and the risks from new technologies.

Our key picks from this interesting conversation full of anecdotes and experiences from Ross's long career are:

For more expert comments, please view the entire episode.

Fridays with Fintelekt today features J Michael Skiba, international financial crime expert, with host Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services in a conversation around fraud. Michael, popularly known as Dr. Fraud, has had several years of experience helping individuals and corporations become safer against frauds, scams and schemes.

Fridays with Fintelekt today features Jessica Davis, President, Insight Threat Intelligence, an expert on terrorist and illicit financing, with host Shirish Pathak, Managing Director, Fintelekt Advisory Services.

On CTF methods in general, Jessica strongly believes that all of the current measures have negative externalities, and that as a CTF community, some of the human rights or financial implications of CTF measures may have been glossed over. There is a need for the AML/CFT community to take a long hard look at regulations and recommendations and ensure that they are tied directly to observable and prevalent terror financing mechanisms.

Visit the website of Insight Threat Intelligence https://www.insightthreatintel.com/ for more insights and analysis around Jessica's work and the books she has authored.