Evolution of Financial Crime

With the evolution of technology, a new reality has set in for its users as technology enabled economic crime. Cybercriminals began exploring new tech-centered avenues to engage with different forms of financial crime like fraud, money laundering, and corruption. Due to the convenience of monetary transactions on a global scale, illegitimate money also takes advantage of the structured transaction systems, along with legitimate finances. Financial crime nowadays is not just faster, but more divers than ever, and technology has become a vector for novel criminal activities.

For that, cybersecurity has become an important, front-line defense mean of protection against financial crime with these teams increasingly responsible for managing information security, technology resilience, and other aspects of data privacy controls. Today, the fight against digitized financial crime predominately, includes anti-money laundering (AML), anti-bribery and corruption (ABC), anti-tax evasion and sanctions monitoring. Through these means, technology has become part of fighting financial crime where new technologies detecting illicit activities, thus identifying criminal behavior and combatting financial crime.

With the increased interdependence on technology as a result of global measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic, understanding how technology can be used to combat digital financial crime becomes important. Additionally, understanding the role of whistleblowers and how technology can be used to enhance whistleblowing is one of the key areas that requires further probing and understanding.

These elements will be probed in our Financial Crime and Whistleblowing in the Digital Age event on June 30^th 2020.