'Let’s #FightFinancialCrime' engaged experts and social influencers in a live Twitter chat about how to tackle financial crime, including money laundering and modern slavery. Read their thoughts and join the conversation.
- Our live Twitter chat invited some of the leading minds on the topic of financial crime to contribute and share their insights.
- The Twitter discussion follows our major report examining the true cost of financial crime, such as money laundering and modern slavery.
- Transparency, more stringent fines, and greater collaboration between private and public sectors, are seen as key to tackling financial crime.
Financial crime is a trillion-dollar industry that takes an enormous social and economic toll on the lives it touches. It is multi-faceted, multi-national, and very often invisible, making it hard to identify, measure, and combat.
The impact is felt in many ways and encompasses bribery and corruption, money laundering, fraud, theft, cybercrime, and slavery and human trafficking.
We are committed to uncovering the true scale of the financial crime challenge, to raise awareness and create the data and coalitions that will increase our ability to fight financial crime together.
Our global report, ‘Revealing the true cost of financial crime’, considers the scale of the challenge, measures the impact on business, society and people, and identifies ways it can be mitigated.
To support this important survey, we hosted a live Twitter chat and invited some of the leading minds on the topic of financial crime to contribute and share their insights.
Participants included risk, compliance and RegTech social influencers.
Our aim was to reach one million but we achieved a 5.4 million social reach during the Twitter chat.
The questions below were asked during the one-hour conversation. Some of the answers received are added underneath:
Q1 – Will sharing financial intelligence contribute positively to the fight against financial crime?
“I believe it’s imperative. A 2017 survey among financial crime professionals indicated that lack of information sharing had a negative impact on their organizations and their ability to fight financial crime.”
Che Sidanius, Global Head of Financial Crime and Industry Affairs
“Yes. Right now, companies are treating KYC due diligence data as IP, costing everyone a lot, multiplying efforts, and cutting out key actors (law enforcement, civil society journalists) from helping.”
James Cohen, Director, Programmes and Engagement at Transparency Canada
“Co-operation is essential – many initiatives have already demonstrated success.”
Neira Jones, Advisor and speaker on information security, payments, risk, fraud and digital innovation
Q2 – Do you think collaboration between governments and private sector can make a difference to the fight against financial crime?
“Absolutely! The closer regulators work with industry, the more effective and enforceable the regulations.”
David Doughty, Corporate governance expert and business mentor
“When government and the private sector trusts each other, this tends to produce great results. Think of global geopolitical conflicts around the world.”
Phil Siarri, Innovation research expert and founder of Nuadox.com
“Makes a difference, but is it enough? Criminals don’t have to worry about rights, laws, privacy, etc, so they are able to develop new criminal schemes much more quickly. Responding and counteracting by law-abiding entities takes time…”
Anu Sood, Director of Product and Corporate Marketing, CaseWare Analytics
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Q3 – What can be done to better fight financial crime?
“Make it someone’s responsibility — it is too easy for financial institutions, regulators, governments and police to shrug their shoulders and blame someone else.”
David Doughty
“First thing is that government has to devote resources to fighting these crimes. A story yesterday said lack of police and prosecution resources in the UK caused white collar prosecutions to fall by 6 percent to 7,786 in 2017. There were 273,600 fraud cases in 2017.”
Anu Sood
Q4 – What systems and processes are core for businesses to reduce losses from financial crime?
“Good, clean and combined client data is important for many regulatory (e.g MiFID II) as well as #fightfinancialcrime requirements, and yet it still often is not given the correct priority.”
John Cant, Financial sector consultant and market commentator
“Fundamentally, it involves having the right data at your disposal. Either from within the organization or using external data providers and combining the two in order to provide a complete picture of who you are doing business with.”
Che Sidanius
Q5 – What is considered best practice in fighting bribery and corruption?
“Transparency and free press is the best tool against corruption.”
Sergio Caltagirone, Director, Threat Intelligence and Analytics at Dragos
“Information has to be used to explain laws and processes, but also to raise empathy for the victims. Corruption is no faceless crime. If employees understand this, they are most alerted to protect company and society.”
Patrick Henz, Head of Governance & Compliance U.S. at Primetals Technologies
Q6 – How can we increase the will to report financial crime?
“As with GDPR, significantly increase the fines for not reporting financial crime.”
David Doughty
“Break the ‘Stop Snitching’ cycle. Inform and empower employees, citizens.”
Phil Siarri
“Two suggestions: Strong whistleblower protection mechanisms and laws; deferred prosecution agreements.”
James Cohen
Q7 – What can be done to help mitigate modern-day slavery?
“Raise awareness of where it is happening, as with ABAC publishing league tables of which countries have the worst record (like the Anti-Corruption Index) is a good start.”
David Doughty
“Consumer awareness for one (did you know there’s a high chance your cat’s food was produced with slave labor?!). Accountability down the supply chain. Don’t let the parent company off the hook. Tough good-practice validation enforcement.”
James Cohen
Join the conversation
With a combination of transparency, more stringent fines, and an alliance between private and public sectors, we may finally be reaching a point where we can look on the future of financial crime with hope.
If you would like to learn more from us or our influencers, follow the conversation and join us to help #FightFinancialCrime.
