Blogs & Vlogs

“At GCAL we are taking classroom engagement and experiential learning to the next level” In 2019 our goal was to go that extra mile for our clients, bringing something different and innovative to the classroom. That was when we discovered the intuit…

Watch an update from our founder and MD of the Academy, Lee Byrne – reflecting on the past 12 months but looking forward to exciting new products and services coming in 2020 and beyond.

Well, there is no doubt that we wouldn’t have achieved our continued growth and success without the generous help and support from our associates and loyal clients, who are such an important part of the Great Chatwell Academy of Learning story. So…

What is Customer Due Diligence (CDD)? Do you know your SDD from your EDD?  Do you understand the significance of 25% beneficial ownership?  Can you differentiate between passive ownership and effective control?  Do you know the difference between a…

What are Crypto Assets? Crypto Assets? What are they? That’s easy – you’re talking about a fancy new term for Bitcoin, aren’t you? A bit like when we stopped talking about KYC and started talking about CDD. It used to be a virtual currency and now i…

Tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax efficiency, tax arbitrage, tax rationalisation, tax management – these are all terms used to describe the various methods of reducing the tax bill of a legal or natural person. But how do you distinguish between them…

Much has been written about money laundering and what it actually is – in terms of the concept itself and the offences of money laundering. It seems simple – it has been drilled into employees, in financial services particularly, that money launderi…

Often spoken about as partners in crime (pun intended), bribery and corruption are not the same.   Corruption is the umbrella term for various activities conducted by those in positions of power, quite often those with political power, by abuse of t…

What is terrorist financing? Terrorist financing, as a concept, is concerned with the provision of funding or resources to proscribed terrorist organisations.  The devil, however, is in the detail, e.g.: There is no internationally agreed upon defi…

We continue to work closely with leading cryptocurrency technology… View

“Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent wea…

Obtaining the resource and budget that is required to train and educate staff on their financial crime management responsibility is sometimes challenging, because how do you measure the return on investment if this investment is designed to deter il…