Financial Crime - Compliance & Change: Alistair Catto, Managing Director, Beyond (United Kingdom)

05/20/21 • 17 min

Captivated Audience: A Financial Crime Podcast

Ch-ch ch-ch changes! Al Catto joins Sam Sheen and Marie Lundberg to talk about his company, Beyond and their speciality - change transformation involving AML/CFT programmes. Turning around failed RegTech or even onboarding processes is no easy task. Al shares his insights on the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to successfully implementing a transformation project. Want faster KYC? Streamlined CDD onboarding? Will KYC RegTech solve the cost of compliance every time? And where does customer data fit into all of this? Learn about the tips - and traps - that firms often fall into when trying to solve that ever present problem - the balance between operations and customer satisfaction and the cost of financial crime compliance. Part 1 of 2 podcasts.

Previous Episode

Financial Crime Innovators: David Christie, Chairman, Bleckwen (Paris) (recorded on 6 May 2021)

David Christie, Chairman of Bleckwen, joins Marie and Sam to chat about the amazing world of behaviour detection and how Bleckwen has harnessed machine learning to better detect fraudulent and suspicious behaviour. With a name linked to a "truth serum", Bleckwen has been involved in some "deep truth" investigations dealing with better detection of complex fraud such as PPP fraud, where it is a challenge for banks with larger legacy systems. Credit origination fraud, synthetic ID fraud, and oddities in transaction monitoring patterns, according to David it's all about behaviour. Marie dives into the use of graph theory - did you know it was used to design London's tube system? - the same approach is used by Bleckwen to identify patterns across banks accounts and parties, how they interact, how often and other similarities. David also explains how they encourage their team to go further afield to keep their thinking fresh - could Tweets prior to the Catalan unrest in 2018 have helped to detect it earlier? Sharing their intelligence and some of their algorithms to the wider financial crime prevention community (for free) is an important part of Bleckwen's approach to being a part of the financial crime community.

Next Episode

Financial Crime - Compliance & Change: Alistair Catto, Managing Director, Beyond (United Kingdom) - Part 2 of 2

Marie Lundberg and Sam Sheen are joined again by Al Catto, Managing Director of Beyond, to discuss all things change related when it comes to AML/CFT compliance programs. We start Part 2 by discussing the way in which FinTech's approach change and its impact on key AML projects; the importance of test planning to make sure the change you want has the intended impact, and the politics involved in major change initiatives. We also explore the risk of being too inflexible when it comes to your change plan, how it's unrealistic to expect it to all go perfectly and the value in being flexible - you don't always get it right even as the Change Coordinator. We also consider how best to deal with those "naysayers" who have little faith that the RegTech you want to use will improve your customer onboarding. And finally - what makes for a a successful "change conductor" - should you wallow in the compliance drama or can you rise above the mayhem like a former colleague known as "the Smoke" (you'll have to listen to find out!).