Financial Crime - Long Reads, News, Articles & Research: Finextra

AML Basics: How to prevent money laundering

Dominique Dierks Content Manager at Finextra

AML Basics: How to prevent money laundering

In today’s globalised economy, money laundering is increasingly concerning for financial institutions worldwide. 2022 alone, the worst-recorded year for AML events, recorded over 16,000 AML events. In the UK, the government estimates that money laundering costs every single household £255 a year. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that crimin...

05 April 2024 /crime

What’s AML? Understanding anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing

Dominique Dierks Content Manager at Finextra

What’s AML? Understanding anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing

In banking, AML (anti-money laundering) describes legally recognised rules and activities that financial institutions perform in order to combat money laundering. AML is closely attached to CFT (counter-financing of terrorism), and AML regulations tend to combine money laundering (source) with terrorism financing (destination). What are the main t...

22 March 2024 /crime

The FinCrime outlook 2024: Money mules, AI, and new PSR rules

Níamh Curran Senior Reporter at Finextra

The FinCrime outlook 2024: Money mules, AI, and new PSR rules

Financial crime is on the rise every year, as criminals hone their tools with new technologies and find more ways to circumvent controls. As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, users should be aware of the threats they pose. So what kind of developments might we expect from the coming year, and what have we learned from the mistakes made in 2...

22 February 2024 /crime

Lost my heart to a deepfake: Dump your fraudster this Valentine’s

Sehrish Alikhan Reporter at Finextra

Lost my heart to a deepfake: Dump your fraudster this Valentine’s

Shadows are creeping up from the depths of the dark web, ensnaring lonely hearts at their lowest by using loving words and falsified images to sink their claws into their bank accounts, emptying their funds and leaving them heartbroken and penniless. Romance fraud has become a common form of gaining the trust of a victim to financially exploit the...

14 February 2024 /crime

The state of cybercrime in the financial sector

Dominique Dierks Content Manager at Finextra

The state of cybercrime in the financial sector

Digital innovation continues to accelerate, but modernisation also offers a fertile breeding ground for cybercriminals. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, surveying cybercrime across 16 countries, the financial sector comes in second in the global cyberincident damage statistics. More gravely, the average cost of a cyberattack is...

09 February 2024 /crime

A data-driven response to economic crime in the UK

Michael Haley CEO at Cifas

A data-driven response to economic crime in the UK

Future historians looking to define our era will have little trouble naming the epoch; we are living in the ‘Data Age’. According to numerous sources, 90% of the data created in the world was created in the last two years and it is predicted that the volume of data created will double every two years. The economic benefits of this ‘Data Age’ are w...

04 December 2023 /crime

What is a DDoS attack and what impact do they have on financial services?

Níamh Curran Senior Reporter at Finextra

What is a DDoS attack and what impact do they have on financial services?

ChatGPT saw an outage last week which has been blamed on a Distributed Denial-of-Services (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks are nothing new within the financial cybersecurity world, the first is believed to have occurred in 1999, commonly known as the Mafiaboy attack against the University of Minnesota, but there were similar instances that predate this....

16 November 2023 /crime

Deepfake fraud: the rising threat in financial crime

Níamh Curran Senior Reporter at Finextra

Deepfake fraud: the rising threat in financial crime

As it’s Halloween, spooky season is the perfect time to highlight one of the scariest, and arguably creepiest growing developments in financial crime, the deepfake. Deepfakes have dominated national headlines for a while now, often for especially unsavoury reasons, and for their political usage. They have now become a tangible issue within the fi...

31 October 2023 /crime

Why compliance is a competitive differentiator when combined with a quantum focus

Paige McNamee Senior Reporter at Finextra

Why compliance is a competitive differentiator when combined with a quantum focus

Phillip Doyle's professional journey reads like a fintech hall of fame. Having held pivotal roles at Revolut, ClearBank, Tandem Bank, FICO, and Visa among others, he's not just a veteran in the world of financial technology; he's a become a connoisseur of financial crime prevention. As the chief risk and compliance officer at Zepz, Doyle faces an ...

07 September 2023 /crime

New ways of customer authentication in payments

Sehrish Alikhan Reporter at Finextra

New ways of customer authentication in payments

Customer authentication has a become a staple in security processes for payments as a way for the platform to verify a consumer's identity and ensure the transaction is approved and secure. While there are a range of digital authentication processes, a common use case among banks is two-factor authentication which verifies the user’s identity at t...

26 June 2023 /crime

Fraud prevention and cybersecurity in the era of PaaS

Sehrish Alikhan Reporter at Finextra

Fraud prevention and cybersecurity in the era of PaaS

Payments-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers operate on cloud-based platforms and offer services such as card issuance, cross-border transactions, and e-commerce gateways. PaaS platforms have disrupted the financial industry as non-bank competitors and fintech startups that are offering personalised and innovative products to consumers. This is an excer...

23 June 2023 /crime

The tip of the iceberg: Assessing the CFTC’s lawsuit against Binance

Arvin Abraham Partner at Goodwin Procter

The tip of the iceberg: Assessing the CFTC’s lawsuit against Binance

On 27 March 2023, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Binance in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Binance, as of the time of writing, remains the world’s largest crypto exchange by a large margin. Binance’s international exchange dwarfs its closest rivals having more than...

26 April 2023 /crime

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