Julia Chin told us about how compliance fits into the organisation and gave examples of where compliance failures have brought down banks – there are a lot. There’s a balance to be struck between enforcing compliance and encouraging compliance. She described her personal journey into compliance and how life experience makes her a better compliance officer.

Luke Raven says that it’s important that you manage your own career, that you treat it as a project and don’t be ″pushy″ by asking people you don’t know for a job, or free advice. But if you do things that demonstrate your value and willingness to learn and it’s likely that it will come back to you. Networking works. He drew attention to the dramatic changes in compliance where it’s now moving towards the centre of management having been set aside from general management for many years. Now, he says, that the hard skills of investigation, law and regulation and so on are as important as ever but soft-skills, a collaborative approach, is growing. Tech has its places but it doesn’t replace compliance and it won’t any time soon. If tech can ″amplify″ the force that’s fine. The most important question you can ask as a compliance officer is ″why?″ ″if you are doing KYC because the policy says to do KYC, you are missing the point.″ Compliance needs to fit the nature of the business. What works in one business won’t work in another.

Michael D Loewen, CAMS, CCI, FIS, CRC, CEIC started by explaining that Open Source Intelligence is everywhere and that with a simple search you can find many good courses free. And if you volunteer with e.g. a human trafficking group, they will often provide training free. One of the primary techniques Michael demonstrated is to keep looking. Don’t assume that the first thing you find is the only thing to be found. Also, when searching, learn about operational security so you don’t tip off the target by revealing your own presence. Michael demonstrated the use of a number of publicly available data sources – it’s surprising how much is available – even where website holders think their data is not public.

The next Forum is The Economic Crime Forum on 30th May concentrating on the FATF watch lists and its effect on countries and institutions and people within them.

https://financialcrimeforum.co...