TMAP – THE MLRO ACCELERATOR PROGRAMME

Regulatory change is not an event, it’s a permanent reality for firms. However, keeping up with new regulations has never been more difficult for risk and compliance professionals. This is particularly true where firms have international operations and therefore, wider influences and responsibilities. As regulators across the globe increasingly take active steps against individuals who are not maintaining their professional levels of competency, today’s senior financial crime professionals must stay on top of evolving supervisory expectations and changing regulatory reporting requirements.

Performing and documenting a holistic assessment of financial crime risks is the cornerstone to managing an effective framework of systems and controls to deter, detect and disrupt crime. However, time and again regulators continue to identify gaps in critical areas of financial crime systems and control frameworks namely: governance and oversight, risk assessments, due diligence, transaction monitoring, and suspicious activity reporting.

Meeting the challenges of new regulations, rising customer expectations, and the threats posed by global networks of sophisticated criminals requires a new, technologically driven approach to financial crime compliance. Though many of today’s MLROs are neither technology experts nor digital natives, understanding current innovations and learning how to harness digital technologies successfully is critical to your ability to prevent customer mistrust, lost business opportunities, and reputational damage.

What does it mean to be influential? How do you persuade senior managers, colleagues and staff within your firm pursue a unified approach to tackling financial crime? Knowing how to influence and persuade others is vital if you want to successfully change minds, lead change initiatives and operationalise new procedures.

Challenged not only, by regulators to identify high risk clients or transactions, but pressured by the business to conduct faster customer due diligence checks, MLROs in 2023, must utilise all the information available to them to help accelerate the investigative process..

According to The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), your firm’s AML risks and cyber security priorities don’t exist in a vacuum; they intersect and should be considered together. A grasp on how these two threats converge are crucial for senior financial crime compliance professionals faced with the challenge of integrating cyber incidents into their AML programme.

Regulators across the globe continue to report on persistent failings in financial crime controls. But whilst failure to have adequate financial crime systems and AML controls in place may grab the headlines, it’s the regulators’ criticisms of a firm’s remediation of known weaknesses in financial crime controls, prioritisation of financial crime risk mitigation and a perceived or actual lack of senior management engagement with financial crime issues that is the real story.

The regulator’s appetite to impose tighter financial crime legislation on financial firms, willingness to open enforcement investigations and commitment to undertake criminal proceedings against firms and individuals for financial crime breaches shows no signs of reducing. At the end of 2021, 80 financial institutions had been fined $2.7 billion for AML-related failures by regulators, up from 24 firms fined in 2020. The message is clear, individuals and firms knowingly or unknowingly failing to comply with specific AML regulations will be subject to severe fines and enforcement action.