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Insight : Holly Whitehead
Holly Whitehead
You’ve got your ICA qualification - what happens now?
The key steps you can take to maximise the potential for professional success that your ICA qualification offers.....More
Compliance training – the real value and benefit to the modern compliance professional
What is the real value and benefit of training to the modern compliance professional?
Six steps to improve your customer due diligence
CDD is a key part of any firm’s anti money laundering and counter financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) framework. With this in mind, this blog looks at six steps that the reader can take to help improve their CDD.....More
United Arab Emirates: the rapid pace of regulatory change
It is often said that the only constant in life is change, and that certainly rings true for the current regulatory climate. The global nature of financial crime means that all regulators, and firms operating in the regulated sector, must be quick to respond to threats.
Blockchain: an introduction
Blockchain is capturing the imagination of the financial services for its potential to reduce risk and decrease costs. It’s easy to consider blockchain as a unicorn – elusive, never seen and no one seems to quite know its capabilities. Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT), but what exactly is blockchain and DLT? And how can they be used by mainstream companies?....More
Irish stockbroker enforcement action: What were the issues and why do they matter?
On 8 May 2019, the Central Bank of Ireland found Campbell O’Connor & Company, a private client stockbrokers
[Infographic] 6 tips to help you on your study journey
'An investment in knowledge pays the best interest' - Benjamin Franklin....More
Monetary Authority of Singapore launches debut enforcement report
The Monetary Authority of Singapore details enforcement actions and key initiatives as it launches debut enforcement report.
Standard Chartered $1.1 billion enforcement action: what lessons can we learn?
It was announced that Standard Chartered has agreed to pay more than $1 billion to US regulators and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). What lessons can we learn from this?....More
[Infographic] FATF Reports in Brief: Human Trafficking Infographic
In August this year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published a new report that aims to raise awareness and provide an updated and more precise understanding of the financial flows related to human trafficking.
A look at the illicit financial flows from wildlife crime and illegal wildlife trade
When asked to consider IWT, many people would think of ivory and tiger skins; but it is so much more than that. IWT can be broadly defined as ‘any action which contravenes current legislation (nationally or internationally) governing the protection of animals and plants’ (NPCC).....More
The Financial Conduct Authority publishes 2018/19 business plan
The FCA’s business plan for this year has had to strike a careful balance between the considerable amount of work that is going to be taking place on Brexit, which is already well underway, and their other strategic priorities.
Who’s been on Santa’s naughty list? Top FCA fines of 2017
At the beginning of this year, the ICA published the top Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fines of 2016. So as we come to the end of 2017, I thought we’d take a look at who’s been on Santa’s naughty list this year; in other words, the top FCA fines of 2017.....More
Anti money laundering: a spotlight on Sweden
At the International Compliance Association, we regularly find ourselves deliberating money laundering issues, which can range from recent enforcement actions to newly published reports showing the latest figures for details such as suspicious activity reports or jurisdictional risk. Which is why, when I read a headline stating that the Swedish legal system was being exploited to commit money laundering, quite a discussion was sparked.
Financial Crime in the Middle East and North Africa - 2017 Report
In this comprehensive report, it was revealed that the biggest obstacle to investment in technology is cost. We have broken down the key findings of the report into this infographic, to help you understand the need for forward planning.....More
How effective is Ireland's AML system? An analysis of FATF Mutual Evaluation Report for Ireland
Ireland is an important regional and international financial hub and is included in the IMF’s 29 systematically important financial centres. This is evidenced in the sheer number of banks looking to move some of their operations from London to Dublin in the wake of Brexit.
Legal marijuana in Canada
You might be unaware that at around the same time, across the border in Canada, a taskforce was set up to provide recommendations on the outline of a framework for the regulation and legalisation of recreational cannabis in the country. A report was subsequently published which delineated these recommendations, exploring how cannabis should be regulated, minimum age requirements, personal allowance and packaging.....More
Regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology planned in Gibraltar
Distributed ledger technology (DLT) – of which blockchain is one particular type – is a decentralised database. This means that instead of records being held by one trusted entity that is the true source of the information (which is how many databases operate at the moment in the form of a ‘centralised ledger’), a group of peers maintain a shared database. Therefore, the consensus of the group is the record: there is no single trusted source.
Top Ten FCPA Fines
As this is Anti-Corruption week, I thought it would be good to take a look at the top ten fines handed down to companies under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Five key points of the upcoming Fifth Anti Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD)
What is the 5AMLD? 5AMLD is a bit of misnomer, as it is in fact a set of proposed amendments to the Fourth Anti Money Laundering Directive (4AMLD) which is to be transposed on 26th June 2017. These proposed amendments were published in July 2016 as a way of strengthening the 4AMLD in light of recent terrorist attacks in Europe.....More
Crime Survey for England and Wales
In January this year, the Office for National Statistics released its latest Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW). The CSEW is a face-to-face victimisation survey where individuals resident in England and Wales are questioned about their experiences of a selection of offences in the last 12 months. This survey - which covers October 2015 to September 2016 – includes for the first time the offences of fraud and computer misuse (also known as cybercrime). Although the CSEW is unable to compare the results for fraud and cybercrime to previous years, the figures are still pretty staggering.
Reviewed: 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index
Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index was released this week, so we've taken a look at the more notable movements in this year's report.....More
Technology: the future of tackling insurance fraud in Ireland?
The insurance market is a dynamic sector offering increasingly sophisticated products to its customers and providing competition to other parts of the financial services industry. The insurance sector’s growth is particularly noticeable with some jurisdictions reporting a doubling of premiums in the last decade.
Beneficial ownership: A new era of openness? (United Arab Emirates)
Beneficial ownership is a phrase likely to leave the average person baffled and probably not very bothered. But it’s a concept set to attract much more interest over the coming months and years, thanks to the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (4MLD), and the central registers of beneficial owners that it will introduce.....More
Warning to banks in Hong Kong
The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched a dedicated anti money laundering (AML) department on 1 August, and this triggered my interest in reading more about AML-related developments in Asia Pacific. I came across an article from May this year which talked about how regulators in Hong Kong, for example the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), are cracking down on trade based money laundering (TBML).
The BCCI Scandal
After reading the comments on my previous blog on some of the biggest money laundering cases of the last 30 years, I have been inspired to look into one of those cases in more detail. The case involved the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, and it has made for very interesting reading.....More
Corruption: perception and reality in Ireland
Corruption can be defined as ‘Dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power’ and usually falls into three main categories: grand corruption, petty corruption and political corruption, which the anti-corruption campaign organisation Transparency International defines more specifically.
Top 5 Money Laundering Cases of the Last 30 Years
Money laundering and, conversely, anti money laundering (AML), continues to be a hot topic, especially within businesses and large corporations, as government agencies – particularly in the US (where an estimated £231 billion is laundered annually) – continue to crack down on money laundering and sanctions violations.....More
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