Moving the Needle - Defining, measuring, and improving FinCrime effectiveness

Many key players in the FinCrime world have been seeking to define the term ‘effectiveness’. Following the lead of the global standard setters, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), most regulators have sought to assess the issue through subjective evaluations of ‘how well’ businesses meet their compliance obligations.

Recently, the US federal government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has sought to take a more measurable approach, suggesting that an ‘effective’ FinCrime programme delivers ‘useful’ Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) – in other words, financial intelligence that materially helps law enforcement investigations.

But despite such attempts to take a granular and concrete approach, the meaning of the term ‘effectiveness’ is still ambiguous for stakeholders in both the public and private sectors and is often re-interpreted to mean measuring what is easy – especially outputs and efficiency – rather what matters – outcomes and impact.

In this panel therefore, we bring together a number of leading FinCrime practitioners to scrutinise what the term effectiveness can – and more importantly should – mean in the for the stakeholders in the FinCrime world, and explore pragmatic and practical ways in which all stakeholders can help ‘move the needle’ in a positive direction