In some cases, what happens in Vegas is just too good to keep in Vegas. Here are some highlights from ACAMS 15th Annual AML and Financial Crime Conference.
From September 26-28, risk and compliance officers and other professionals packed this important industry event to learn about anti-money laundering; risk management strategies; innovative technology solutions; regulatory and law enforcement news; and other hot topics in the world of fighting financial crime. 2500 attendees came from a wide array of industries, including: financial institutions, casinos, accounting firms, insurance companies, law enforcement and regulatory agencies, law firms, technology providers, universities and other organizations.
Agenda Highlights
Here are some of the Attivio team’s favorite sessions:
In the month since FINRA announced total of $17 million in fines against financial adviser Raymond James and its financial services affiliate, two threads have circulated through social media. The first took note that broker-dealers were now squarely in the enforcement sights of regulators. The second focused on the piercing of the corporate veil and the penalties administered to James’ former AML Compliance officer.
According to the latest evidence, The US Treasury estimates that over $300 billion in money laundering flows through casinos annually. The two leading sources of funds, fraud or drug trafficking, account for just over $64 billion alone. Recently, officials at the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – the agency responsible for monitoring casino operator compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970- have stepped up their AML compliance rhetoric and activity. And they’re not alone.
Occasioned by the announcement of a consent order with Florida bank Gibraltar Private Bank and Trust, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or, OCC) announced two significant updates to its policies and procedures for calculating civil money penalties for non-compliance or persistent, uncorrected BSA/AML compliance. The OCC took the opportunity to call-out failures in the Gibraltar response to earlier orders - setting clearly tougher expectations for under-performing or unresponsive compliance programs.
Google’s recent announcement that it would discontinue support for the Google Search Appliance (GSA), in favor of a cloud-based implementation for its Google Search for Work offering seems to suggest a dilemma for enterprise architects. But the dilemma is false and enterprise application developers don’t have to make a choice between a migration to the cloud or a future spent managing open source solutions (OSS) ...
The challenges you face as a risk and compliance professional reflect forces beyond your control. You’re between an accelerating expansion in technology – which offers new avenues for misbehavior - and a rising tide of regulatory expectations. It’s a classic problem of supply and demand.
Start with the supply-side. Combine the human resources, known information resources, and the technology solutions you deploy for risk and compliance (R&C), and you essentially determine your supply of time to monitor, investigate, and react. Finding qualified R&C professionals has never been more difficult. Information has never grown faster. And solutions have never been more difficult to replace.
What to Get for A Person Who Calculates Everything
Talking with colleagues and friends in business lately, I’ve taken a new tack. After all, it’s the season that celebrates gifts - large and small. After greetings, I’m asking, “What’s on your list this year?” I get all sorts of answers - from the sublime (typically, peace) to the ridiculous (mostly, political) – but it’s the answers of a friend – call him Jerry for convenience, that I thought I’d share today.
“The only thing better than certain insight is certain insight you don’t have to work hard to find.”
Our view of any business situation is enhanced when every relevant insight is available for consideration. In the early days of search, our queries determined precisely what we found. We were limited by the data that was indexed and the terms we searched.
Now, ask a question of your smartphone. If you have location services activated, you may be surprised that you get a bit more than you expected in the answer. If the context of your location is related to your question, you’ll be informed – even though you didn’t explicitly ask. Isn’t that nice?
The single, most-important determinant of the lifetime value of a modern, enterprise-wide application is its dexterity in adding or changing the data sources that drive the application. ‘Rock stars’ deliver solutions that provide value and benefits for years, adapting to new or evolving data sources quickly and easily. And, now, there’s no excuse for not being a ‘rock star’.
As the forces (mobility, social, personal, cloud), sources, and use cases behind enterprise applications change, the agility with which you can adapt the flow of information hinges upon how quickly and easily you can provision the right information. And that breakthrough begins with data virtualization.
How Data Virtualization Drives Secure, Agile, Enterprise BI
If you believe that the convergence of Big Data and Big Analysis is a ‘half full’ opportunity, chances are you’re familiar with and engaged in the implementation of data virtualization to accelerate the move to data democracy in your organization. New tools extend the franchise for secure, well-governed data provisioning – offering the ease of self-service and/or dramatic gains in IT productivity. By eliminating many of the costs and risks associated with traditional data integration methods, virtual data marts break the bottleneck between data management and data analysis.
Start with the supply-side. Combine the human resources, known information resources, and the technology solutions you deploy for risk and compliance (R&C), and you essentially determine your supply of time to monitor, investigate, and react. Finding qualified R&C professionals has never been more difficult. Information has never grown faster. And solutions have never been more difficult to replace.
