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Over this Summer Series we've traced how sanctions screening came to be — from its origins in the 1970s, through its industrialisation after 9/11, and now into the present day. This is the third and final episode: Reinventing Screening, the Era of Intelligence, from 2014 to today. Narrated, as ever, by Pascal Aerens. Sanctions now change daily. Payments settle in seconds. And financial crime networks adapt just as fast. The Russia-Ukraine war put all of that to the test, with thousands of new designations arriving at unprecedented speed. But this episode is about more than volumes: screening is no longer a matter of matching names. Ownership, control, relationships and transaction networks now decide whether a transaction can be a risk — and artificial intelligence is beginning to change what's possible, without displacing human judgement. The lesson from five decades of this story is a simple one. The future of screening is better intelligence, not more alerts. Music credits: "A Few Jumps Away" by Arthur Vyncke

Our Summer Series traces how sanctions screening in financial institutions came to be, from the 1970s to the present day. Part two is The Industrialisation of Screening: From 9/11 to the First Ukraine Crisis in 2014, again narrated by Pascal Aerens. After 9/11, screening moved to the heart of the global financial system. Banks adopted continuous monitoring. Sanctions regimes widened, and so did the demands of know-your-customer and politically exposed person checks. But scale brought a new problem: a flood of false positives, and the growing difficulty of separating genuine risk from noise. Sanctions themselves also became more dynamic — and legacy platforms began to strain under real-time payments, constantly shifting lists, and ever-larger datasets. Music credits: "A Few Jumps Away" by Arthur Vyncke

In this Summer Series, we trace the story of sanctions screening in financial institutions from the 1970s to today. In part one of three, Pascal Aerens covers the origins of screening, from the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 through to the year 2000. Music credits: "A Few Jumps Away" by Arthur Vyncke

In this episode which is all about APIs and Cloud, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and Jeeva Moni. Jeeva is an associate partner at EY in London, and specialises in consulting for financial services and transformation of Financial Crime function using innovative technologies. As digital transformation is reaching financial services, APIs became an essential part of the transition from legacy siloed solutions, to ecosystems of components, allowing banks to deliver products in an agile way. This was particularly visible when the pandemic forced banks to beef up their digital channels very quickly. Pascal and Jeeva also discuss the future of Financial Crime Technology, and how financial services now understand why cloud adoption and APIs are critical to their capacity to adapt very quickly to changing conditions, as with the new sanctions programs imposed on Russia. Jeeva often says that API stands for “Accelerated Path to Innovation”, and we’ll see how that is true, more than ever.

In this episode, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and JB Graftieaux. JB has been active in compliance and payments for 20 years, first at Paypal and eBay, and now at Bitstamp, the oldest regulated crypto exchange in Europe.  Together with Pascal, JB explores how FCC regulation of crypto has evolved over time, how to approach regulators in different countries, and what types of licences are available for crypto entrepreneurs. They dive into compliance regulations specific to crypto, such as the "travel rule", and explain how the community is working together to implement it.  JB also talks about how exchanges collaborate to fight against financial crime, and lobby regulators to help shaping future regulations.

In this episode, which is all about FCC in the securities industry, we listen to a conversation between Luc Meurant and Jim Freis. Jim has an enormous experience in FCC, as a former head of FINCEN, the Financial Intelligence Unit of the US, and then later as chief compliance officer for Deutsche Börse Group in Germany. Jim brings a unique perspective on financial crime compliance. He combines experiences from public and private sectors, has been working for incumbent and disrupter companies, and has been operating both in the US and in Europe.  In their chat, Luc and Jim explore the many facets of FCC in the securities domain, from how screening and monitoring securities transactions is different from payments, to how regulations may evolve, and how the emergence of crypto could influence the industry’s future.  To kick off the conversation, they start by looking at how securities are different from payments, and how the complexity of securities transactions makes it harder to define effective financial crime policies.

In this episode, which is all about data privacy, AI, and the cloud, we listen to a conversation between Neterium’s Chief Commercial Officer Florence Vicentini, and Raphael Dana. Raphael is attorney at law based in Paris, and has been practicing for over 15 years. He has been advising many companies around data privacy related questions, and has numerous clients in the financial sector.  Florence and Raphael are discussing many of the hot topics in the data privacy debate. including scope and roles in the European GDPR regulation, the consequences of the cancellation of the US Privacy Shield, as well as the new cloud offerings trying to solve the data confidentiality, and data sovereignty issues. But first, they start by reflecting on the apparent paradox of privacy in FCC. where we need data to perform KYC checks and enrich our AI models, but at the same time we must respect Data Privacy regulations.

In this episode, which is part of our series on AI in FCC, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and Eric Malherbe. Eric has been working as an expert and consultant in FCC technology for nearly 15 years. Today’s conversation is focusing on a concept that looked like the holy grail of FCC, the “single customer view ”. Eric and Pascal speak about their experience and wonder if this concept is now a reality or still a myth. To kick off the conversation, they remember how things started around 2008, when the term single customer view what first heard in FCC.

In this episode, a special look back at 20 years of FCC, we listen to a conversation between Peter Bauer and Neterium's CEO, Luc Meurant, as they discuss how watchlist screening has evolved over the years from the early days after nine-eleven to today, with AI, the Cloud and industry-wide initiatives. Peter  is a senior advisor at the Basel Institute on governance. Through his former role at UBS and his participation and advisory work in many leading industry groups including the Wolfsberg Group, Peter has been ideally positioned to witness the evolution of financial crime compliance over the last 20 years. To kick off the conversation, Luc and Peter remember how banks had to completely change their approach to screening, very quickly, after the events of nine-eleven.

In this episode, which is the first of a series about AI in FCC, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and Staffan Rolfsson.  Staffan has been working in FCC technology for 15 years, mainly at one of the largest banks in Scandinavia, and has many years of experience in Artificial Intelligence. Today’s conversation is focusing on “pragmatic AI”: what is AI and machine learning, how it can help, what is hype and what is real. For a few years now, AI has been presented as THE solution to all FCC problems -from better screening to perfect monitoring to ultimate fraud detection. Usually there is a gap between marketing claims and reality, so Staffan and Pascal explore what types of AI techniques can actually be used in FCC, and what could really make a difference. To kick off the conversation, they start by looking at the AI landscape in FCC today.

In this episode, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and Francis Chlarie. Francis has been working in the payment space for over 15 years, and is an expert in payment technologies.  The subject of this conversation is Instant Payments: why they are important for the financial services industry, and how they require a complete rethinking of the payments processing chain, including compliance.  They explore why instant payments is such a hot topic right now, why it’s important for e-Commerce merchants, and how it fits in the Central Banks plans to eventually issue digital currencies.  They also discuss the impacts of instant payments on FCC and screening, and how it requires a new approach.

In this episode, we listen to a conversation between Pascal Aerens and Chrisol Correia, Both of them have been working in Financial Crime Compliance technology for 20 years. In this conversation, they reflect on the recent rise in interest for KYT ("Know Your Transaction"), a detection technique where technology is used to detect suspicious transactions, with no other data source than the content of the transactions themselves. They discuss how AI, and more specifically Natural Language Processing (or NLP) are making it possible to extract information from transactions in real-time (which is so important as the world migrates to instant payments) and how programs can actually find persons and entities details in financial transactions that remain, even today, very badly structured.