How can we wake up and bring light to the long night of money laundering?
GK, Lucinity’s founder, and CEO joins D. Edward Wilson to discuss the way out of the long night of AML and the bringing forward of a new dawn of compliance.
Anti-money laundering (AML) professionals have been left in the dark for a long time. What can we do to shine a light and bring in the new dawn of compliance?
It’s been a long, dark night
Money laundering is a global and savvy enterprise, taking advantage of both social and technological engineering to remain unseen. But unfortunately, AML efforts have been struggling to keep up:
- AML is placed into a defensive posture, plugging the leaks of unscalable, unsustainable rule-based systems that require massive amounts of manual labor to enact little impact,
- which creates a backward-facing routine for financial institutions, left regarding AML compliance as a set of checkboxes focusing on transactions instead of patterns and behavior
Precision, performance, and economics matter in AML. Legacy systems still let too much dirty money slip through the cracks due to:
- hard thresholds
- distributed and obfuscated behavior masquerading as consumer activity
- lack of pattern recognition due to not enough (and poorly utilized) resources
Even in the case of reported suspicious activities (over 3 million SARs have been filed in 2021 alone), investigators struggle to make sense of the data and follow through on money laundering cases.
This long and dark night has been a boon to money launderers and a bane of both financial institutions and regulatory bodies, who need to work together to bring light to AML.
How do we wake up AML?
That’s the 2.4 trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?
Former Executive Secretary of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) David Lewis has the right idea: “We need to stop talking and start doing. The world doesn’t need more standards or regulations.”
He’s right: we need to act. Swiftly, smartly, and decisively.
AML compliance needs to move from defense to offense. Both AML teams and regulators need tools that can look beyond single transactions and onto the horizon of behavioral patterns. Tools that empower AML analysts by removing the legacy components of compliance investigations, such as the burden of manual data processing. Tools that help all those who guard the world’s finances with a new paradigm in combating financial crime.
GK, Lucinity’s founder, and CEO joins D. Edward Wilson to discuss the way out of the long night of AML and the bringing forward of a new dawn of compliance. Moderated by Samantha Sheen, this expert panel is a must-see for all AML compliance professionals on both the banking and regulatory sides of the equation.
