Financial Crime Matters

In this episode of “Financial Crime Matters with Kieran Beer,” Kieran talks with Sal Melki, Deputy Director for Illicit Finance and Public Private Partnerships at Britain’s National Economic Crime Centre and the National Crime Agency. Speaking with Kieran at the ACAMS Assembly in Europe this spring, Sal details some of the anti-crime efforts of the NCA, including “Operation Destabilise,” which brought down a more than billion-dollar money laundering operation that converted dirty money for transnational criminals into more fungible cryptocurrency.

In this episode of "Financial Crime Matters," Kieran asks former senior banking regulators Lisa Arquette, Donna Murphy and Suzanne Williams to draw on their cumulative decades of insight related to US anti-financial crime regulation. Recently retired, Lisa, Donna and Suzanne discuss their roles in defining Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA, requirements over the past twenty years at the FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Federal Reserve Board, respectively. Recalling that anti-money laundering oversight was once "given to the most junior [bank] examiner" and primarily involved asking tellers "what they did with cash," Lisa, Donna and Suzanne detail how the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Congressional hearings and other events brought about the huge expansion of BSA responsibilities for financial institutions. In discussing their careers, Lisa, Donna and Suzanne also touch on how inter-banking agency conflicts were dealt with and what they wished their agencies might have accomplished but did not. Finally, they conclude by discussing the current shift in regulatory priorities manifest by the changing role of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, and the push to grant banking charters to digital asset companies and other fintechs.

In this episode of "Financial Crime Matters," Kieran talks with Megs Shah, the CEO and founder of The Parasol Cooperative, a not-for-profit that has created an AI tool to reach and serve the victims of domestic violence, child sex abuse, and labor trafficking. Drawing on her successful career in AI working with large corporations and her experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, Megs discusses how the cooperative has created technology that allows victims of violence to safely seek emotional support and ultimately resources that can help free them.

In this episode of “Financial Crime Matters,” Kieran talks with Joseph Salama, chief compliance officer at Coinbase, about mitigating financial crime risk associated with digital assets. Joe discusses current regulatory frameworks for crypto currencies, touching on the Stablecoin Act, Europe's Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) and some current proposals for oversight, arguing that the industry needs clear guardrails, not regulation by enforcement action. Proper regulation, he says, will produce enough friction to help identify and interdict illicit transactions, give crypto users confidence in digital markets, and minimize roadblocks to legitimate crypto asset transactions. With cryptocurrency an increasingly important component in money laundering schemes, Joe envisions holistic oversight of transactions that breaks down walls between traditional financial institutions and digital asset service providers, while expressing optimism a convergence of both is already underway and will only grow.

In this episode of “Financial Crime Matters,” Kieran talks with Jason Blazakis about his book, "Terror Disrupted: Countering the Financing of Terrorism." A professor at the Middlebury Institute and a former counterterrorism finance office director at the US State Department, Jason concludes that the current global situation and the "combination of losing [anti-terrorism] resources with the 'deprioritization' of terror as a core security threat has put us at risk in a way we haven't seen since 9-11." While describing red flags for financial institutions to identify terrorists and terror funds, Jason also names the actors he sees as most dangerous for America and argues for a greater government commitment to countering terror threats, not least from homegrown and self-radicalizing individuals who have been responsible for the accelerating number of terror attacks in America over the past thirty years.