AML

About the Field

Congress began weaponizing the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) in the 1980s to fight drug related money laundering. Every financial institution (Which includes banks, money services bureaus and business that will exchange one type of currency for another) is required to do robust analytics to prevent their company from being used for money laundering. After 2001, the BSA was expanded to include Terror Financing. In the coming years, many experts expect legislation to mandate that banks monitor transactions for signs of human-trafficking. AML is a robust career field with some educational institutions even offering graduate degrees like this one.

Know your customer (KYC)- These individuals carry out the due diligence required of banks with regards to determining whether a customer is suspicious. They will often search an individual against databases, federal and international lists of known high-risk or politically compromised people. They also may use open-source investigation techniques to determine if a customer’s transactions are in line with typical behavior.

AML Analytics- Every transaction that goes through a bank must be scored in terms of its risk that its somehow involved in money laundering. This is a big data problem that requires data scientists to use enterprise tools required to work at tremendous scale. Additionally, since criminals are always evolving their tactics, predictive algorithms must be constantly tuned and evaluated.

AML Investigator- Those fancy algorithms will flag hundreds, if not thousands, of suspicious activities every day. Once they do, an alert is generated and routed to an investigator. The investigator will dig into the details to determine whether or not to file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN). These reports are analogous to police reports and can be critical evidence to local, state and federal agencies who can pick up the reports to create criminal cases.

Get Qualified

The Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists (ACAMS) offers numerous certifications that are very frequently mentioned in AML related job posts. You can read more about those HERE. Additionally, these employers tend to prioritize hiring anyone with financial experience. If you’ve supported financial intelligence investigations, worked with FinCEN data, made link charts, or even just worked as a bank teller all of that experience can be very valuable.

Job Search Keywords

AML, CAMS, KYC, Transaction Monitoring, Financial Crimes, AML Compliance, Sanctions Compliance