Five reasons I’m excited for CW’s Financial Crimes Summit

That might go double for practitioners in the financial services space. No industry faces greater regulatory scrutiny, and the stakes are only getting higher for compliance and risk practitioners themselves. While agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are rapidly pushing through new rules, concerns of keeping pace are on the rise.

Compliance Week’s Financial Crimes and Regulatory Compliance Summit will address these matters head-on. The event, taking place at Fordham Law School in Manhattan, New York, on June 10-11, will feature more than 50 prominent speakers representing government agencies, regulators, banks, investment advisers, and more tackling the top-of-mind risk areas facing the financial services industry.

The conversations might be uncomfortable, addressing the tensions laid out above, but the summit will offer the opportunity for attendees to learn from their peers, share their experiences, and ask regulators to answer the questions keeping them up at night.

Below is what I’m looking forward to at the event:

1. Regulator representation

We have strived to provide a diverse array of regulatory and government agency views across our agenda.

Fireside chats will feature officials representing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, while panel discussions will include views from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on internal investigations, the SEC on regulatory updates and examinations and uses of AI in compliance, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority on fraud detection.

For those struggling to keep pace with the rate of regulatory change, don’t miss out on the chance to hear first-hand from these speakers regarding their agencies’ respective expectations.

2. Prominent practitioners sharing their stories

A Compliance Week event isn’t complete without compliance and risk officers taking the stage to discuss their own experiences.

The agenda is full of these opportunities, from former Danske Bank CCO Satnam Lehal and Morgan Stanley financial crime compliance head Molly McLane discussing lessons learned from bank remediation plans, to a trio of experts talking management of nonbank partner relationships. We also have a leadership panel that will feature four CCOs examining and interpreting the current risk landscape.

There’s no doubt this event will be a forum that will offer best practices and takeaways from the compliance perspective.

3. Focus on future financial crime fighters

One panel in particular I’m excited about will examine how senior compliance leaders can help to ensure they are not only recruiting the best talent but designing training programs that enable their new hires to rise to the challenges associated with fighting fraud and financial crime.

I’ve told others I think a more interesting conversation than the “CCO of the future” is the “compliance team of the future,” given the need to maximize diverse skills sets to get the most out of limited resources. Building up your junior team members might just be the X factor to success in that regard.

4. A deeper dive on CW’s latest case study

We appreciate the positive feedback we’ve received on our latest case study, “The Banks Behind the Epstein Enterprise,” and are looking forward to the chance to bring the comprehensive report to the stage at our event.

Case study author Alyson McDevitt will be joined by two subject matter experts she interviewed for the report—former New York State Department of Financial Services Superintendent Maria Vullo and former Goldman Sachs Managing Director Jamie Fiore Higgins—to discuss business integrity risks and lessons learned from Jeffrey Epstein’s bank partners, what happens to corporate culture when profit overrules compliance, and the dos and don’ts of know your customer/anti-money laundering compliance.

All attendees at the event will receive complimentary access to the full case study, which is typically available exclusively to CW members.

5. Comprehensive look at off-channel communications

Firms attempting to meet regulatory requirements for monitoring employee use of off-channel communications for business purposes face a bedeviling number of obstacles, wrote CW’s Aaron Nicodemus as part of a multipart report last fall.

The longest session at our event—at 75 minutes—will take the deep dive necessary to address these obstacles, including effectively handling issue identification, management reporting, and training; understanding the practicalities of archiving; and the necessity of disciplinary measures to ensure compliance and channel adherence in a global context.

As massive penalties continue to come down from the SEC and CFTC regarding related recordkeeping violations, it’s important for firms to know the risks and get ahead of the issue before examiners identify it first.