At times, enforcement agencies will issue a press release that announces the resolution of a case, but that also elicits more questions than answers. Sometimes the most instructive lessons for compliance, accounting, and internal audit teams can be found in what is not stated publicly.
Best Practices
Posted inBest Practices
From mainframes to Agentic AI, what legacy system discipline can teach us about building trustworthy customer data platforms
For the past decade, I’ve led customer data and regulatory platforms at one of the world’s largest card issuers, following years modernizing mainframe systems at IBM. The mainframes I maintained early in my career were not sophisticated by modern standards. They earned the trust of the organizations that depended on them anyway, because every transaction […]
Posted inBest Practices
China’s “Mythos moment” is coming. Its release gate is already built.
China’s “Mythos moment” is coming. Its release gate is already built. Washington spent June 2026 governing Mythos-level models for the first time: Systems whose autonomous cyber and agentic capabilities register as national security consequences. The label borrows from Anthropic’s Mythos 5, restricted that month; the government’s attention also reached OpenAI’s GPT-5.6. No Chinese lab has […]
Posted inBest Practices
When compliance reporting creates false assurance
Boards are not short of compliance information. Most receive dashboards, heat maps, training figures, investigation data, audit findings, remediation updates, and regulatory summaries. The difficulty is deciding what all that information really says. A report can be accurate, well presented, and still leave directors with too much confidence. That happens when evidence of activity is […]
Posted inCulture
Corporate culture programs: What are the key points of failure?
The benefits of corporate culture programs have been recognized for some time: they contribute to better corporate governance, more effective risk management, and create a better environment for compliance.
Posted inArtificial Intelligence
Chris Dimitriadis, chief global strategy officer at ISACA, on why compliance protects global FS from AI Armageddon
AI-enabled cyberattacks could take down multiple financial service firms simultaneously in a series of “correlated failures”, posing a systemic risk to the global financial system.
Posted inSanctions
How ordinary Russian investors got caught in the sanctions net
When sanctions against Russia began multiplying in 2022, the public images were hard to miss: Yachts seized in European ports, villas frozen, bank accounts linked to oligarchs blocked. What I remember from the compliance side looked less visible and much more procedural. It was passports, residence permits, source-of-wealth documents, ownership charts, explanations of old bank […]
Posted inBest Practices
Navigating the supply chain’s new normal
A supply-chain disruption can look simple: A supplier cannot deliver, procurement finds an alternative, engineering qualifies it and production continues. Geopolitical disruption rarely arrives labeled as a compliance problem. It arrives as a sourcing decision, engineering fix or logistics reroute before compliance becomes involved. Recent developments include: Enforcement shows what can be at stake. In […]
Posted inBest Practices
Record-setting AML penalty against UBS was years in the making
FinCEN and several other regulators levied a combined $125 million penalty against UBS Financial Services (UBSFS), a broker-dealer and futures commission merchant, due to a series of long-standing compliance failures. The total penalty was a joint effort of federal regulators, including FINRA ($20 million), the Securities and Exchange Commission ($20 million), and the Commodity Futures Trading […]
Posted inArtificial Intelligence
AI governance becomes top future skill for entity compliance leaders
Compliance professionals who can demonstrate their understanding of AI governance risks and contribute to closing current governance gaps are well placed to support their organizations and boost their own future careers.