Changing the way organisations adopt intelligence to protect themselves and society from financial crime

Financial crime threatens the safety and soundness of financial systems world-wide. However, financial crime compliance has never been more  challenging. As regulation becomes more robust, businesses need to demonstrate that their compliance programmes are effective. And keeping up with sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) requirements demands dedicated compliance resources. As the speed and intricacy of fraudulent schemes evolve, effective detection and prevention is also vital.

Acuminor has been at the forefront, supporting organisations to adopt an intelligent, threat-led approach to protect themselves and society from financial crime.

Meet Martin Nordh, the co-founder and CEO of Acuminor, a regulatory tech company specializing in anti-money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions. Martin has a background from law enforcement, justice department and international banking and has great experience in identifying and handling strategic financial crime risks in large organisations. He is also an author and international lecturer in the subject. Martin holds a LL.M., a BA in Political Science and a Law Enforcement degree”.

In this interview, Martin shared great insights on Acuminor’s market development strategy, enabling regulatory environment, peculiarities of financial crimes in different regions  and the future of financial crime intelligence.

Interview:

What problem is Acuminor trying to solve and why is it that important?

Today, many organisations do not have enough understanding of the financial crime threats and risks they are exposed to.

That is why we founded Acuminor: To pioneer the way organisations adopt an intelligent, threat-led approach to protect themselves and society from financial crime.

Acuminor was founded in 2018 in Sweden by five co-founders with backgrounds from law enforcement, international banking and IT. Together we are passionate about creating a Brighter World, with less harm from financial crime. We specialise in financial crime intelligence. With our experts and machine learning we have created the world’s largest database of financial crime threats and risks. Powered by the unique insights in the database, our platforms help organisations understand and reduce their risks from money laundering, terrorist financing and sanction violations.

What products and services do you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it? What are the key markets your solution(s) address?

Acuminor’s unique and powerful risk analysis platforms enable companies worldwide to comply with regulations and protect themselves and society from money laundering, terrorist financing and sanction violations. Our platforms include:

ThreatView:

Enables organisations to access the world’s largest database of financial crime threats and risks. Designed for operational environments, organisations can significantly improve outcomes across their existing financial crime systems and controls ranging from customer risk assessment and KYC/B processes through to transaction monitoring arrangements by leveraging updated financial crime threat intelligence.

Risk Assessment Professional:

A ground-breaking approach to risk assessments and other strategic risk analysis. Risk Assessment Professional allows organisations to make informed decisions based on facts and intelligence, not on gut feeling. Using our Risk Assessment Platform, you are able to get comparable results across your organisation and maintain a dynamic view of your organisations threats, risks, controls, and vulnerabilities in one centralised place and generate powerful reports and action plans to make enhancements where required.

Implementing Acuminor’s innovative solutions enables organisations to transition to a more threat-led approach, that will allow an organisation to transform their entire financial crime framework to focus on mitigating real world threats and demonstrate effectiveness in their control environment to have real impacts on financial crime detection and prevention.

Our key markets and customers span across regulatory authorities, banking, financial services, gaming companies, law enforcement, real estate agents and payment service companies.

Acuminor received investment funding in February this year, with the intent to venture into new markets. Will some of these funds be utilized in implementing its market development strategy into Africa? What is your assessment of the state of financial and cybercrime regulation in Africa?

Acuminor has in a short time proven the value of our products with more than 750 customers, of which the larger have global operations including in Africa.

Earlier in 2022 we launched a new office in London and has doubled in size. We are now able to scale internationally and we look forward working with customers and partners in Africa to help them manage a problem that is growing in both cost and complexity to manage.

Africa is an emerging market and has high growth potential, a recent report conducted by Data Bridge Market Research[1] projected that the anti-money laundering market is projected to register a CAGR of 13.5% in the forecast period of 2021 to 2028.

This has been bolstered by both technological and regulatory advancements, all of which are aimed at strengthening the fight against money laundering and fighting terrorism.

Africa also has challenges with wild-life trafficking and modern-day slavery, Acuminor exists to support organisations and countries in the fight against financial crime and building a Brighter World.

Having cited that Acuminor currently operates business through 2 risk analysis platforms; Risk Assessment Pro and ThreatView, which serve companies around the globe, are there any peculiarities you have noted, particularly, with the character of financial crimes in different regions or business terrains? And how well have your platforms served those in these terrains despite these peculiarities?

Great question!

Threats occur in the real-world, they involve real people – perpetrators, victims, enablers, insiders – and many other people and objects that get caught up as collateral damage.

Each threat may involve multiple modus operandi (or methods for committing a crime), and modus operandi will vary hugely across the world and in different environments.

In the context of financial institutions, threats can be thought of as the ways in which your organisation can be misused for money laundering, terrorist financing or sanctions evasion purposes. Threats and risk are nuanced and will vary for organisations around the globe who offer different products and services.

Acuminor tackles these nuances and helps organisations understand the threats they are facing by conducting an analysis of the external environment. Acuminor collects financial crime intelligence from a vast number of vetted sources. Experts, assisted by technology such as machine learning models, process significant volumes of information, structuring this into the intelligence behind Acuminor’s comprehensive library of threats and risk indicators.

At the time of writing Acuminor had analysed reports from 750 vetted sources of financial crime reports totalling more than 300,000+ pages to create a database of more than 3000 threats and 11,000 risk indicators. If you were to re-create the same analysis manually it would take you approximately 54 years working full time.

Acuminor’s intelligence is organised on a global, regional, and national level.

Structuring the intelligence in this way allows for a systematic approach to analysing the threat landscape and standardises the taxonomy for threats and risks so that you and your organisation can draw evidence-led conclusions about how financial crime can impact your operations in different countries.

With more and more industries embracing the culture of digitalization, this could mean greater adoption of compliance measures and increased awareness in financial crime , are there any particular concerns about the efficiency or effectiveness of the current compliance policies to support this boom and combat increased crimes?

Current processes are often based on a generic understanding of risk.

Based on what we know about criminal behaviour, financial crime does not look the same in the U.K as it does in for example South Africa.

Different criminals will want to misuse you in different ways depending on who you are, where you are and what you do as a company. Given this fact, technology is worth very little if it does not come with updated, relevant and detailed intelligence that allows you to understand how you can be misused by criminals and where your highest risks are.

Recently, the Interpol confirmed financial and cybercrimes as the biggest threats worldwide, they also advised understanding and anticipating crime trends as a good place to start in combatting these crimes, to what extent do you think companies’ KYC/AML policies and regular KYC/AML/CFT training can help organizations to understand and anticipate these crime trends?

Empowering staff and senior management across organisations are a key component of any financial crime framework.

It must be risk-based, in other words it should reflect the actual financial crime risks that the organisation might be exposed to in their everyday operations.

Today, most organisations do not have the intelligence or resources they need to support their staff to implement a true threat-led approach.

Due to this lack of curated intelligence, capacity and supporting technology, organisations are unable to truly understand the wide-ranging threats and risks which they face in sufficient definition. This limits their ability to adopt a truly risk-based approach and can lead to a scattergun approach both from a policy perspective, but also KYC/B process. This can have significant impact on customer experience, a key area of competition for financial institutions whilst also failing to be effective in the detection of higher risk scenarios and mitigation of threats. Whilst their approach may be seen as compliant with regulations, this is not enough in isolation to demonstrate effectiveness.

With our ThreatView platform we provide organisations with access to dynamic Threat Cards with an ocean of updated and relevant intelligence with descriptions of financial crime methods and risk indicators. Organisations who have already implemented our technology benefit from using our intelligence to enhance their training programmes by empowering their staff to make better decisions and outcomes that are truly based on facts.

To be effective and compliant organisations need to ensure that their policies and procedures need to be risk-based.

They should reflect the outcomes from the business-wide risk assessment. Otherwise, it is a case of why have a policy that no-one can use or one that does not actually capture the risks that their organisation is facing.

Which is why Acuminor’s Risk Assessment Pro tool helps organisations design their policies and procedures to meet the demands of their true risk environment and enables you to ensure that you are targeting real deficiencies in your control framework. This approach helps you achieve the right level of governance that is specific to your organisation, your risk appetite and considers a dynamic assessment of how effective your group wide controls are performing against a world of emerging and evolving threats.

Your Threatview platform was recently updated to include a brilliant new feature; ThreatView NewsFeed which provides expert analysis to financial crimes daily, how do you think this has successfully supported the anti- financial crimes activities of companies?

We are committed to help build a Brighter World, and we are proud to support society in its fight against financial crime.

This is why we launched our free service ThreatView Daily, powered by Acuminor ThreatView.

Organisations can benefit from signing up for free to our financial crime news feed directly via our website (https://doc.acuminor.com/threatview-daily-newsletter/).

Financial crime has been on the rise for a long time, latest due to a multitude of factors such as the recent pandemic and sanction regimes. By signing up to the news feed from Acuminor we are helping organisations to stay informed with financial crime news and enabling them to leverage our expert analysis of threats and risks. The in-depth insight helps financial crime teams to us to build internal business cases, review their current processes of managing financial crimes against emerging threats and risks and drive better operational efficiencies.

Acuminor presently serves over 750 companies in 16 countries. How enabling are the regulatory environments in these markets? If you could make one request to regulators in any of the markets that are relevant to you, what would it be?

Well, it is a problem which means we exist and are solving for both companies and the regulators.

Much of the financial crime information that is published by regulators, leading authorities, think-tanks etc is unstructured.

Meaning it is hard to digest the information and make the leap to determine which parts are relevant for your organisation. Equally, whilst we are seeing a move towards greater sharing of information between regulators and shared frameworks. Technological advancements in some countries, differences in local practices and criminals adopting new measures to exploit the systems means there cannot be a one size fits all methodology unfortunately. Although conversations are on the increase on partnerships between public and private sectors, but many of these partnerships lack the framework to store, share and update the modus operandi.

Acuminor’s intelligence is arguably the golden standard for financial crime intelligence – which is organised on a global, regional, and national level. Structuring our intelligence in this way allows for a systematic approach to analysing the threat landscape and standardises the taxonomy for threats and risks so that organisations, regulators, and enforcements agencies can draw evidence-led conclusions to the impact of financial crime in different countries.

We already have two regulators using our solution, and our request would be to get more regulators using our solution to drive better information sharing capabilities between both public and private sectors in one centralised view using our solution.

How would you describe the future of financial crime intelligence? Any final thoughts on how you or your organization will be a part of this future?

Today, the threat of financial crime has never been greater, and the risks to financial institutions are wide-ranging and severe.

Rapid digitalisation has also enabled organised crime groups to become more interconnected, exposing organisations to a growing number of threats and risks.

We already saw how the pandemic disrupted business models, Brexit is another factor to mention and how it slowed the methods of collaboration and the recent war between Ukraine and Russia have all highlighted the instability of economic markets, and it is times like these where organised crime and criminals tend to look find loopholes and weaknesses in systems and processes to exploit. Thus, this should be a lesson that there needs to be greater information sharing and tougher regulatory action against firms that are not doing what they should be doing.

We want to do everything we can to help our clients truly understand how they can be misused for money laundering, sanction violations and terrorist financing by criminals as well as which mitigating actions, they must take to prevent that from happening.

Our organisation is committed to creating a Brighter World.

[1] https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/middle-east-and-africa-anti-money-laundering-market