Financial crime prevention: tandems, not silos

To fight financial crime effectively, we need to break the silos between the AML, fraud detection and cyber security units.

In recent times, we have seen huge scandals around money laundering in the most prominent banks, such as Danske Bank, Nordea, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC. Billions of suspicious transactions flowed freely through those institutions which, as a result, were exposed to severe penalties and reputation damage.

The issue has come back fiercely due to the FinCEN Files investigation conducted by BuzzFeed News and made headlines by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in September of this year. The investigation report, based on the leaked documents from FinCEN, revealed over 200,000 suspicious transactions valued at over US$2 trillion. The transactions were made from 1999 to 2017 within…