To start us off, can you tell us a bit about your role at Monzo Bank and your focus as Head of FinCrime for Business Banking, EU and Sanctions?
I have been at Monzo Bank almost 4 years now. When I first joined, I worked on building financial crime controls for the Retail Bank, before moving across to the Business Bank at the start of 2023. My background is in corporate and business banking so I was really pleased to return to it. I’ve always working on sanctions policy at Monzo and it’s been fun to watch it grow and change as the world changes around us. Finally, when Monzo decided to go international, I signed up to be part of that journey and it’s been exciting to watch everyone come together to make new banks in new locations!
Can you provide some insight into what effective sharing of AML-detected activity with fraud and cyber teams involves within a unified operating model?
For me, this is about playing football instead of running a relay race. So often I see firms ‘pass the baton’ between teams but it would be more efficient to have everyone working together with the same goal in mind. I want a shared data layer, joint investigation units, feedback loops and machine learning to enrich customer profiles, spot trends and learn on a loop. It’s no longer about sending an email and saying the job is done, we have to integrate information across the areas that need it because all support each other‚ like the players on a football team.
How can financial institutions effectively move from traditional alert clearing toward more intelligence-led, cross-typology investigations and risk anticipation?
We need to continue progress away from tick the box compliance toward outcome based effectiveness with metrics to match. We need to break the typology silo by building data interoperability and move from manual alert clearing to agentic AI approaches. Machine Learning models can help us learn at scale and we need to be looking to the horizon always. It’s no longer a ‘nice to have’ for us to think about the future and the world around us.
What does strong cross-team coordination look like when dealing with money mule and IVTS typologies?
It’s a smooth, efficient system where people work in parallel. The fraud team identifies the theft, the AML team finds the muling and the security team identifies the infrastructure, all at the same time. Getting on top of money muling means near real-time signalling shared across spaces in the same moments with a joined up view and a data stack that includes all possible information at once. For IVTS, AML teams should be focusing on the signals and seeking cyber support to understand the IVTS customer profile. A joint investigation across AML, fraud and security could help us identify parts of the pattern.
Can you outline some of the challenges involved in upskilling financial crime analysts to work effectively across fraud, AML and sanctions?
It’s busy! People who have traditionally worked in Fraud or Financial Crime may need to cross-skill and it’s tricky to achieve this when time is tight. Organisations need to provide opportunities, training and development. Sanctions is its own huge item too; the pace of change is incredibly fast and it’s impossible to stay on top of it all, but teams need different levels of training to ensure the risks are spotted in the right places.