The first blog in our Accelerating Payments series looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic has propelled payments digitisation, opening the door to a realm of future possibilities. With a vaccine now firmly on the horizon, will payments revert, or will the trend continue?

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), established in 1989, is the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog that sets international standards that aim to prevent illegal activities and the harm they cause to society.

London - This blog, first published on the Law Society of England and Wales website, provides five actionable steps to help law firms manage compliance and keep up with ever changing AML requirements.

As part of our ‘Ask the Expert’ series, we ask senior investigator John Dell'Osso about The Sentry's recent investigation, Overt Affairs, which uncovered sanctions busting in North Korea.

For years, the insurance industry was perceived as a lower risk for financial crime compared to the banking sector. As a result, it was spared the intense scrutiny and heavy fines regulators imposed on financial institutions for deficiencies in anti-money laundering (AML) controls.

Arthit Saeli, the owner of a commercial real estate company in Thailand, entered a local bank to open a new account. No red flags arose during the onboarding process. The account manager opened the account, shook Saeli’s hand and thanked him for choosing their institution.

Sanctions do have some effect in terms of creating an administrative threat, but in practical terms, there is still a long way to go.

In the latest of our ‘Ask the Expert’ series, we talk to Mark Nuttall, Country Manager for Hill & Associates in Singapore, about his experiences of combatting complex crime and the ongoing international battle to stay one step ahead of money launderers.

This week saw the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) expose thousands of confidential documents, known as the FinCEN Files. Here, we provide some initial observations on what the leaked documents say about the current state of the global financial crime compliance landscape.

Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are confidential records of unusual financial activity detected by financial institutions as part of their financial crime compliance obligations. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) received more than 12 million SARs between 2011 and 2017 – and more than two million in 2019 alone.

Correspondent banking relationships are vital to not only the banking sector, but to economies as a whole. This vast network of bank relationships breeds financial inclusion, providing populations and businesses with access to banking services that they might otherwise struggle to find, and eases trading party relationships between nations.

In the digital age, there is increasing demand for fast, simple, error-free payments. Yet friction in the payments process often stands in the way of achieving the ease and speed consumers now expect. Organisations that set up, route and process payments must improve straight-through processing in order to keep up with their increasingly digital customer […]