It’s the year 1959. A man and woman walk into a bank. He’s looking very dapper in his suit and tie. He looks around and pulls his fedora a bit further over his eyes. She, a pretty woman with blonde curls pulled back into a neat knot, her vibrant red lipstick in sharp contrast with her white dress. A banker welcomes them and escorts them to their vault. “Ring the bell when you’re done, and I’ll come to pick you up,” he tells them. The banker will never know what’s in that vault. “Look at it,” Vera whispered as she took the diamond out of her bra. “It’s perfect.” “You can’t keep it,” Ben responded. “But once we sell it, I’ll buy you another diamond ring.” Vera sighed and handed the diamond over to Ben who stored it in their vault. They rang the bell and were escorted out of the vault by the banker. Later that day, Robert left the bank to go home. “Extra extra, read all about it!” Robert looked at the newspaper boy. His heart started racing when his eyes hit the front page of the newspaper. He bought a newspaper from the boy and stared at it. “Diamond heist leaves four people and a baby dead,” it read in fat letters. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Beneath the headline was a picture of a […]
They sat in a dark truck. Nakia gazed over the thirteen other women, finally fixating her eyes at the guard who held a machine gun in his hand. Her heart was racing. She knew what was about to happen. The women sat quietly. Scared of their faith. They must have been driving for ages: their military truck and five other army vehicles. But the men that had captured them weren’t soldiers. They were human traffickers. Nakia knew that they were supposed to be sold as sex slaves. But unlike the other women, she wasn’t afraid. She was waiting… All of […]
Prevent fines and reduce workload by applying an alert shaping process. Rising Expectations Regulatory fines in the financial industry spark an action-reaction process. A financial institution – most commonly banks – receive a fine for not upholding regulatory compliance, then suddenly financial institutions everywhere raise the budget for their compliance department, or at least begin […]
Another day, another Deutsche bank scandal. Given Deutsche Bank’s questionable reputation, it’s almost too easy of a subject. However, this is a critical case. It’s an example of the pressure compliance officers sometimes have to face, when it comes to choosing between doing what’s right and conforming to groupthink. Let’s look at the facts. In […]
Being a banker isn’t easy. And it hasn’t been ever since the 2008 financial crisis. That year almost the entire world lost faith in the ethics and integrity of banks. Bankers were dubbed as greedy money grabbers. More than ten years have passed, the public opinion hasn’t changed much and banks are still suffering from […]
Globalization and automation make the call for real-time payment processing ever larger. The world moves fast. People have little patience and understanding for slow payment processing these days. Especially because this form of payment processing lightens liquidity stress for small and medium-sized businesses. And instant payments also increase efficiency, transparency, convenience, and financial control for […]
Transaction monitoring is a high-risk practice as it makes financial crimes such as money laundering hard to detect. That’s because it only concentrates on what’s happening at the transaction or account level. But, individual transactions hardly ever tell you the complete story, while client profiles provide a layered analysis of what’s happening. When we talk […]
Why it is just as hard as AML monitoring AML and sanctions are usually mentioned in the same breath. But while they are closely associated, they’re not the same. Admittedly, sanctioned entities could very well also be involved with money laundering, but this isn’t always necessarily the reason such entities appear on a sanctions list. […]
